They fixed the ladder against the Cross. Joseph of Arimathea
mounted first , and Nicodemus after him. Mary, with John and Magdalen, remained
immediately beneath them. It seemed as if some supernatural grace issued forth
from the Adorable Body, and encircled them round, softening and subduing all
their thoughts , making their hearts burn with divine love, and hushing them in
the deepest and most thrilling adoration. Old times came back upon the Mother’s
heart, and the remembrance of the other Joseph, who had been so often
privileged to handle the limbs and touch the Sacred Flesh of the Incarnate
Word. It would have been his office to have taken Jesus down from the Cross.
But he was gone to his rest, and one that bore his name supplied his place, and
it was both sweet and grievous to Mary that it should be so. One Joseph had
given Him his arms to lie in, the other should give Him his own new monument to
rest in, and both should pass Him from their own arms to those of Mary.
It is strange, too, how often the timid are unexpectedly
bold. These two disciples, who had been afraid to confess their Master openly
when He lived, are now braving publicity when even apostles remain within the
shelter of their hiding-place. Happy two! With what sweet familiarities and
precious nearness to Himself is not Jesus recompensing their pious service at
this hour that He is in Paradise! With gentle hand, tremblingly bold, as if his
natural timidity had developed into supernatural reverence, Joseph touches the
crown of thorns, and delicately loosens it from the head on which it was fixed,
disentangles it from the matted hair, and, without daring to kiss it, passes it
to Nicodemus, who gives it to John , from whom Mary, sinking on her knees,
receives it with such devotion as no heart but hers could hold. Every
blood-stained spike seemed instinct with life, and went into her heart , tipped
as it were with the Blood of her Son, inoculating her more and more deeply with
the spirit of His Passion.
Who can describe with what reverential touch, while the cold
Body was a furnace of heavenly love burning against his heart , Joseph loosened
the nails, so as not to crush or mutilate the blessed Hands and Feet which they
had pierced? It was so hard a task that we are inclined to believe angels
helped him in it. Each nail was silently passed down to Mary. They were strange
graces, these which were now flowing to her through the hands of her new son
and yet, after all, not so unlike the gifts which Jesus had Himself been giving
her these three-and-thirty years. Never yet had earth seen such a worship of
sorrow as that with which the Mother bent over those mute relics, as they came
down to her from the Cross, crusted too as they were, perhaps wet, with that
Precious Blood , which she adored in its unbroken union with the Person of the
Eternal Word. But with what agony was all this worship accompanied, what fresh
woundsall these instruments of the Passion made in her heart! What old wounds they
reopened! But a greater grief was yet to come.
The Body was detached from the Cross. More and more thickly
the angels gathered round, while thrills of love pierced with ecstatic bliss
their grand intelligences. Mary is kneeling on the ground. Her fingers are
stained with Blood. She stretches the clean linen cloth over her arms and holds
them out to receive her Son, her Prodigal come back to her again, and come back
thus!
Can such a sorrow, such an accumulation of concentering
sorrows, have any name? Can she bear the weight? Which weight? The sorrow or
the Body? It matters not. She can bear them both. From above, the Body is
slowly descending. She remembers the midnight-hour when the Holy Ghost
overshadowed her at Nazareth. Now it is the Eternal Son who is so strangely
overshadowing His kneeling Mother. Joseph trembled under the weight, even while
Nicodemus helped him. Perhaps also it was not the weight only which made him
tremble. Wonderfully must grace have held him up to do what he did. Now it is
low enough for John to touch the Sacred Head , and receive it in his arms, that
it might not droop in that helpless rigid way, and Magdalen is holding up the
Feet. It is her old post. It is her post in Heaven, now highest of penitents,
most beautiful of pardoned spirits!
For one moment, the Virgin Mary prostrates herself in an
agony of speechless adoration, and the next instant she has received the Body
on her extended arms. The Babe of Bethlehem is back again in His Mother’s lap.
What a meeting! What a restoration! For a while she remains kneeling, while
John and Magdalen, Joseph and Nicodemus, and the devout women, adore. Then she
passes from the attitude of the priest to the attitude of the mother. She rises
from her knees, still bearing the burden as lightly as when she fled with Him
into Egypt, and sits down upon the grass, with Jesus extended on her lap. With
minutest fondness, she smooths His hair. She does not wash the Blood from off
His Body. It is too precious, and soon He will want it all, as well as that
which is on men’s shoes, and the payment of Jerusalem, and the olive roots of
Gethsemane. But she closes every wound, every mark of the lash, every puncture
of the thorns, with a mixture of myrrh and aloes, which Nicodemus has brought.
The Virgin must now take her last look of that dead Face.
Mothers live lives in their last looks. Who shall tell what Mary’s was like ?
Who would have been surprised if the eyes of the Dead had opened, and His lips
parted, under the kindling and the quickening of that look? With heroic effort
she has bound the napkin around His Head, and has folded the winding-sheet over
the sweet Face. And now there is darkness indeed around her. The very dead Body
had been a light and a support . She has put out the light herself. Her own
hands have quenched the lamp, and she stands facing the thick night.
Faber, Fr. Frederick William (2015-02-14). The Foot of the
Cross with Mary: or The Sorrows of Mary KIC. Kindle Edition.
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