In the first two reflections this month, Mary spoke. At the Annunciation, she asked a question from within her own reality before she said yes. In the Magnificat, she named the world she and her people knew and proclaimed its reversal without flinching.
At Calvary, she is given no words. In this third and final reflection, we move to the cross, to the place where what remained to her was her body, where she stood, and her grief.
Standing near the cross is standing in the noise of the crucifixion, in the press of bodies and the smell of fear and the light at midday when everything else in the world continues its ordinary business and this is happening here, to this person.
Scripture places Mary precisely. She is close enough that when Jesus looks down from his agony, he can see her, close enough to receive the words he speaks.
No action is attributed to her. No words are given to her. She is simply there, witnessing the slow death of her son, and John notices it, and records it.
There is nothing that can be done. The nails, the sign above his head, the thorned crown drawing blood from his brow, the soldiers dividing his garments… all of this has already happened.
Mary is not there to be witnessed in her grief. What brings her to this place is the same pull that draws any mother toward the dying of someone they have loved from the beginning, the dying of her child, because to be elsewhere would be an act of severance. An abandonment of her child and of herself. Staying there and watching him die was all that was left, the only remaining form her love could take was to hold the unbearable in full sight.
The years before this moment were hers in a way no other life was. She carried him, fed him, watched him grow toward something she could feel, something she knew, but could never entirely name. She followed what he was becoming across years and distances, held her understanding of him loosely as it shifted, did not always understand what she was given to see. “A sword will pierce your own soul too,” Simeon’s words spoken to her over the infant Jesus, long before this day. And now she is here, at the end of it, or what looks like the end. And she stands.
John does not speak of what it cost her, Scripture does not tell us what she feels, we are not given her interior pain. What John records is the fact of her presence, and the word he uses for it carries something of duration, of sustained remaining: she was standing there, had been standing there, continued to stand. There is nothing passive in this. It is an act of will.
Those who have stood close to grief, who have remained in places of suffering over years, recognise the refusal of love to render another person’s suffering invisible by withdrawing from it. And we know the cost of witness.
We are not always given to understand what we must witness. There are things that do not move toward resolution, losses that do not diminish with time, grief that embeds itself.
The moment John records is the last act of relation Jesus performs before he dies.
Seeing his mother there, and beside her the disciple he loved, he gives them to each other, forging a new bond in the midst of death, a refusal to let those he loves face what comes alone. Mary receives it, standing where she has stood through all of it, in the fullness of the piercing of her own soul.
We carry this image of Mary into whatever comes next.