Lenten Mission
We find ourselves at the foot of the Cross. With John and the three Marys. Looking up from the ground, all we see are the soles of his feet. Bloody. Ruined. A single iron spike driven through both into the wood. The flesh is torn. And bruised. We can hear him breathing. Barely. Mary, his mother, weeps. John and the other Marys weep. Their sorrow like a millstone in the chest. Looking down, he sees his mother and his beloved disciple. He calls, whispers to his mother: “Woman, behold, your son.” Looking at John, he says, “Behold, your mother.” Hearing this, we glance at the two and see that they see how they are now bound together in suffering. If we could start at the beginning, we might see her freed from the burden of Adam's sin in the womb. We might witness Gabriel's visit to the adolescent Mary. We might see her freed determination, her surrender to the divine will. Her Yes. We might see her as a Young Mother – her love, her protection, her maternal care for the baby and the boy, Jesus. We might see her knowing looks at his precocious questions. We might hear her occasional gasp at some boyish stunt. We might see her smile at his filial obedience and her frustration at his apparent willfulness. We would see – as his public ministry drew to a close – her surrender to the sorrow that she knew would be his suffering. At the foot of the Cross, we bear witness to her sorrow, her suffering, and her surrender.
If the BVM is to be our model for taking on the challenges of Lent, we need to make sure we know what Lent is about. We can start with the via negativa – what Lent is NOT about. Lent is not about sin. Lent is not about fasting, praying, or giving alms. Lent is not about making sure that all our family and friends see us doing Lenten things. Our Lord couldn't be clearer in the Gospels that what we do during Lent cannot be about the veneer of repentance – faux religiosity, playing with the deadly serious weapons we are given for growing in holiness. Just last Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent, Jesus is led/driven into the wilderness by the HS. Why – precisely – is he in that desert? To pray? Yes. To fast? Yes. He does both for 40 days. But he's not there to pray and fast. When he is beyond hunger and exhaustion, the purpose for his time away appears. Luke tells us that Jesus is led into the desert “to be tempted by the devil.” Christ Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah is to be tested. Like newly pressed steel, his strength and endurance must be proven.
That word “proven,” is telling. He is baptized in the Jordan by John. And confirmed in his mission by God Himself – “this is My Beloved Son; listen to him.” But he has yet to be proven b/c he has yet to be tempted. It's the Enemy's job to probe for weakness; to authenticate his identity by showing him everything and anything a man could want or need. And then, to challenge him to love these things of the world more than he loves his own Father. Hungry, exhausted, weak from exposure, Jesus – in his human nature – is dared to abandoned everything he has been sent to accomplish and make the things of the world his god. Despite his hunger, exhaustion, and weakness – or maybe b/c of them? – he refuses. Luke closes the scene: “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.” That “for a time” is right now. Right now, the devil is here to probe, test, and dare us. Forty days before Easter, we follow the pattern of Christ's time in the desert to set ourselves against the Enemy and for God. Lent is when we are to be tempted. Fasting, praying, and alms giving are our weapons. Lent is not a time for playing religious games. It's a time to prove ourselves heirs of the Kingdom.
One last thing before we attend to our Marian strategy for proving ourselves. Who is the Enemy? We will likely say, “the Devil!” Yes. But here's the problem: he is already, always defeated. From the moment he was cast into Hell, he has been the loser. Christ won the victory on the Cross and that victory reverberates through eternity – from the first syllable of Creation to the last breath of the age. Christ won, is winning, and will always win. And so do we as heirs to the Kingdom. We've been baptized into his life, death, and resurrection. When we deny ourselves; take our crosses; and follow him, we follow him into an eternal victory that the Enemy cannot deny or undo. He has no power over us. We are in Christ Jesus, hidden in him, waiting to go to the Father. So, yes, the devil is your Enemy, but the only way he wins is for you to succumb to his temptations and permit him to rule you. The true enemy we face during Lent is ourselves. The battle between Eternal Life and Eternal Death is fought in the divided human heart. And our Marian strategy places us in a position to fully cooperate with every grace God the Father has to give us.
Our BMM weeps at the foot of the Cross. From the moment Gabriel speaks to her to her tears at his death, she has known that her son would die for the sins for the world. She carries this sorrow daily. Until her deathless assumption into heaven, she carries the deep loss of her child. Any mother would grieve but the BM shared in her son's suffering, surrendering to his sacrifice and accepting his death as the price to redeem human nature. There is his sacrifice on the Cross. And then there is hers at the foot of the Cross. He learned obedience through suffering. She accepted suffering b/c she was obedient. From the moment of his conception, Mary hears God's Word and follows her freedom to Golgotha. None of this lessens her sorrow. None of this eases her grief. None of this makes her mourning any less painful. She lives with sorrow like it's another child. Always there. Always needing. Her sorrow abides. But she never succumbs to despair. She never gives up on the Father's plan for our redemption. Even as she weeps at his bloodied feet, she is steadfast in her trust that her son's suffering and death will culminate in the transfiguration of the world. Imagine living day in and day out with nearly unbearable sorrow AND the knowledge that your sorrow will be vindicated. Imagine your grief living with near beatific joy!
For us, during our Lenten testing, the BM's sorrow establishes a pattern, a model for approaching the Cross. There's no disputing the truth that sin – the willful, deliberate choice to disobey God – that sin prevents us from participating fully in the divine life of the Blessed Trinity. When we sin, we choose to say to God, “No, thank you. I don't want your help. I don't want to be a part of your holy family! I can do this on my own.” In effect, we say, “I can be good w/o God. I can be god w/o God.” This is the First Temptation. The temptation of the serpent in the Garden. Knowing the Father's plan to bring Adam and Eve into the divine family, the Enemy dangles before our first parents the possibility of being divine w/o the help of the Divine. NB. the Enemy does not force or coerce their disobedience. He merely suggests an alternative plan, a plan built on a truth and twisted ever so slightly away from obedience. They bite. And their sorrow begins. But this is the sorrow of regret. Not the sorrow of loving-absence. Mary – sinless from conception – sorrows in love. Her sorrow abides in trust and ends in joy.
How does the serpent tempts us in our testing? First, he tempts us to choose to believe that God is merely our occasional rescuer from sin and not our sustaining Father in love. This temptation requires that we adopt a self-sufficient attitude toward growing in holiness: “I can do this on my own. I'll call on God when I get in trouble.” Rather than seeing our lives as fully immersed in the divine life, we see ourselves struggling to achieve some sort of Goodness Goal, a sort of measurable level of Moral Cleanliness. When we fail – and we always do! – we run to God in shame and ask for forgiveness. That's regret. Sure, we're sorry – we sorrow – but it's more of a disappointment in our own strength than it is a sorrow with our failure to love God. The Enemy's next move is to tempt us into believing that our disobedience is inevitable b/c we are fundamentally wicked. If we sin b/c we are weak, then we just have to be stronger! Stronger than what? Stronger than ourselves? Than sin? Stronger than the Enemy? NB. how the devil is keeping us focused on our immediate choices. What about the choices we make to follow Christ? The choice we make daily to live in the divine life? What about the sorrow we feel b/c we have chosen not to love God? Can you live with both your sorrow at sin AND the joy of knowing you are an heir to the Kingdom? A full participant in the victory of the Cross? Do not let the Enemy convince you that you are irredeemably sinful. Our sinless Mother felt sorrow in love daily. She's your weapon against the pride of Eve! Joy in being a child of the Father sends the Enemy packing.
Along with that joy comes suffering. Here we have to be very careful b/c the Enemy knows how to tempt us even when we are being consistently obedient. We cannot doubt that the BM suffers at the foot of the Cross. Hers is not a physical pain due to injury but a spiritual pain, a loss. She grieves. Even knowing all along that the Cross was her son's end, she grieves. And she lets herself grieve. She suffers well. That is, with full knowledge and the consent of her perfectly freed will, she permits/allows herself to mourn the loss of her son. She doesn't try to mitigate her grief. She doesn't beg God to bring him back. To the fullest extent possible, she suffers with our Lord. An arrow piercing her heart as the lance pierced his side. What is this suffering? It is not merely the physical experience of pain or the emotional experience of radical loss. Her suffering is permissive; she allows her pain to be exactly what it is and...still she loves. John is now her son and she his mother. Without diminishing her grief for even a second, BM joyfully receives John as a filial gift, thus receiving all of us as her beloved children.
Here's where the Enemy will tempt us: suffering is to be avoided; it is to be alleviated; or, at best, apathetically endured. Addressing Beelzebub, Satan says, “Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable,/Doing or suffering. . .” The proper demonic response, he argues, is to fight back! Show your resolve not to be pitied! Defy accepting any defeat! Never kneel! No, non serviam. I will not serve. But Christ says, “Deny yourself; take up your cross, and follow me.” If we follow Christ, we follow him to the Cross; and we suffer as he suffered. We permit the pain of sin and death and defeat it in sacrifice. By giving it all to God so that he can remake it holy. The BM does exactly that at the foot of her son's Cross. By saying Yes to His will; by tending to his Word through the years; by her patient permission when he goes to Pilate; by everything she does for 33 years, she suffers – allows – knowing how he will end on Golgotha. For us, the BM show us how to not only endure the burden of mortality but also how to find joy in its limits: sacrifice in love when the sacrifice is everything you love most. This is why Jesus teaches us that we must love him first and most to be his disciples. Our test is no small thing. It is everything, everyday. It's Abraham and Isaac on the mountain. It's Christ on the Cross.
And here is where the BM's surrender enters our arsenal. We can surrender in the face of a superior enemy, or we can surrender before the war. If there is no war, or the war is already won, then there is no shame in surrender. Especially if we are surrendering to divine providence. Remember: Christ has won. Already, always won. The devil is defeated. He is allowed to test us, but he can never win. . .unless we give him our victory through sin. Our principal opponent in our Lenten testing is ourselves, our divided hearts. If we sorrow in love for our disobedience and allow ourselves to mourn the death of the Old Self, always giving over to God so that He can make all we are and have holy, then there is no war to fight. Temptations are only reminders of who we used to be, memories, at best, of how we used to believe that we could be gods w/o God. When the BM gave her fiat to Gabriel, she gave her perfectly freed will to the plan for our salvation. When we were baptized, we gave ourselves to that same plan and for the same reason: we could see the wisdom of providence at work, and we believed in the promises of the Most High! Those promises have not faded. They have been kept. So, what do we surrender when everything we have and are already belongs to Christ? We surrender our need to control. To control outcomes. To control others. To control God. In the face of divine providence, and at the foot of the Cross, we follow Mary's example: we weep for loss and we love sacrificially, giving whatever is in us that we have not already given to Christ. We did not create ourselves. We cannot re-create ourselves. No amount of prayer, fasting, or good works will fix a wounded soul on its own. God does not want our rent garments or ashen heads or checks in the collection plate. He wants our contrite hearts. Split open and burning on the altar. That's the only sacrifice that matters when the time for testing comes. He wants us to turn our lives around, face Him, do His will for our sake, and love to the limits of our graced capacity. Lent is a long 40 days to test our willingness to be sorrowful in our disobedience. To suffer well, knowing we are heirs. And to surrender everything, everything so that we are truly free!