FOURTH STATION
Jesus meets his Mother
V/. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you.
R/. Because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.
“Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favour with God.
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and
bear a son, and you shall call
his name Jesus.
He will be great, and will be called
the Son of the Most High;
and the Lord God will give to him
the throne of his father David,
and he will
reign
over the house of Jacob for ever;
and his kingdom will have no end”
Lk
1:30-33
Mary remembered these words.
She often returned to them in
the secret of her heart.
When she met her Son on the way of the Cross,
perhaps these
very words came to her mind.
With particular force.
“He will reign... His kingdom will have no end”,
the
heavenly messenger had said.
Now, as she watches her Son, condemned to death,
carrying
the Cross on which he must die,
she might ask herself, all too humanly:
So how
can these words be fulfilled?
In what way will he reign over the House of
David?
And how can it be that his kingdom will have no end?
Humanly speaking, these are reasonable questions.
But Mary remembered that,
when she first heard the Angel’s
message,
she had replied:
“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be
done to me according to your word”
(Lk 1:38).
Now she sees that her word
is being fulfilled
as the word of
the Cross.
Because she is a mother,
Mary suffers deeply.
But she answers now as
she had answered then,
at the Annunciation:
“May it be done to me
according to
your word”.
In this way, as a mother would,
she embraces the cross
together with the divine Condemned One.
On the way of the Cross Mary
shows herself to be the
Mother
of the Redeemer of the world.
“All
you who pass by the way,
look
and see whether there is any suffering
like my
suffering, which has been dealt me”
(Lamentations 1:12).
It is the Sorrowful Mother who
speaks,
the Handmaid who is obedient to
the last,
the Mother of the Redeemer of
the world.
PRAYER
O Mary,
who walked the way of the Cross with your Son,
your mother’s heart torn by grief,
but mindful always of
your fiat
and fully confident that He
to whom nothing is impossible
would be able to fulfil his promises,
implore for us and for
the generations
yet to come the grace of surrender to God’s love.
Help us,
in the face of suffering,
rejection, and trial,
however
prolonged and severe,
never to doubt his love. Jesus, your Son,
honour and glory for ever and
ever.
R. Amen.
All:
Our Father ...
Stabat Mater:
Christ above in torment hangs,
she beneath beholds the pangs
