This week the Church marked both the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross and the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. And while this pairing has always felt natural, I’d never paused to consider, before, the more-than-surface relationship between them. This week, however, the readings from Monday’s feast and Tuesday’s memorial have stuck with me, and I’m beginning to realize that together they offer an invitation to a deeper identity with Christ.
Monday’s first reading presents salvation history in microcosm. The Israelites complain against the Lord, a plague of serpents infests their camp, they repent, and God instructs Moses to lift up a bronze serpent in the desert. Anyone suffering the venomous snakebite can look at this bronze figure – the sign of their punishment transformed to a terrible mystery of mercy – and live. In the Gospel that follows, Christ references this story in explicit connection to being lifted up, Himself, “so that everyone who believes in [the Son of Man] may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).
Together, these readings draw our gaze to the Cross, the sign of our guilt and our salvation by the grace of God. They ask us to acknowledge our own sins and fix our eyes on our Savior, recognizing that salvation history continues to work itself out in our lives and in the sacramental life of the Church, the Body of Christ. But with Tuesday’s Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Body of Christ comes into focus even more explicitly, with St. Paul stating: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ… you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Cor 12:12, 27).
Always before, I saw Our Lady of Sorrows primarily as an onlooker, however affected by the pain she observed. I knew that Christ entrusted His mother to us on Calvary, that she prays for us and points us toward her Son at all times. But as the readings remind us, we are members of the Body of Christ, and as a consequence, her presence at His sacrifice, together with St. John and the holy women, becomes something more. It becomes a sign of our participation in His Passion.
Christ saved us. Christ alone. But by the incomparable mystery and mercy of His divine Love, He draws us into this act and its glorious reward, each so far beyond our human capacities. Just as Mary is, in a real way, the first Christian, she is also the first to suffer with Him and to unite her human suffering, her human love, with His. The Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows reminds us to place ourselves at the foot of the Cross, not as bystanders, but as members of Christ’s Body.
We are all called to carry our crosses. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross promises that the Way of the Cross leads, in Christ, to resurrection. But the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows follows to remind us that we are never alone. There is no dimension of human suffering that Christ’s Passion does not embrace and sanctify. We are the Body of Christ; we are called to love with His Love, as Mary did: to recognize His sufferings in those of our brothers and sisters and not to turn away. Christ is with us. Hope in Him.
Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.
