Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025
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The following text guided the homily:
- When Jesus looked down from the Cross, he gazed upon those who were faithful to him to the end. Together with Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, he saw his Mother and his Beloved Disciple, St. John. The author of the fourth Gospel said Mary was there not swooning, not sobbing, but standing. She was able to stand because, despite her sorrow at seeing the blessed Fruit of her womb treated with such cruelty by his own creatures, she was nevertheless filled with hope. That hope was buttressed by her Son’s cry for mercy in his first word and his bestowing mercy in his second. But it went back much further.
- On the Cross we have the third annunciation, this time with Christ giving the words, “Woman, beyond your Son” and, saying to St. John and to all of us, “Behold your mother.” But Mary was able to be hopeful because she remembered the two prior annunciations. In the first, the Archangel Gabriel told her that the Son to be conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit would be great, would be Son of the Most High, called Yeshua or “God saves,” would be given the throne of David his ancestor, and his kingdom would have no end. She believed not just that the Lord’s words to her about her conception would be fulfilled but all the rest, that nothing would be impossible for God, not a virginal conception, not a resurrection from the dead, and that even to other eyes it might seem the crucified Jesus was far from greatness, far from reigning, far from inaugurating an everlasting kingdom, that’s in fact what was taking place as the child she once bathed was now bathed in blood.
- Likewise the second annunciation strengthened the hope that made her stand tall and first on Golgotha. That took place in the Temple in Jerusalem, 40 days after Jesus’ birth, when the elderly Simeon, moved by the Holy Spirit, took the baby Jesus in his arms and prophesied. He began with very consoling words, calling the infant Jesus his salvation, a light to the nations and the glory of Israel. But then he turned to Mary and said, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel.” The words he uses goes far beyond just “ups and downs” or “good days and bad days.” The literal translation is the “ruin and resurrection” of many in Israel. He’d be a “sign to be contradicted,” one spoken against and cursed. If that wasn’t enough to jolt the heart of a mother who loved a Son, what Simeon said next was probably even more jarring: “And a sword will pierce through your own soul as well, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” That would help her to understand the contradictions that would come later, when the wise men from afar would bring not only gold and incense, but strangely myrrh, a preparation for burial; when Herod’s assassins sought to murder Jesus and together with Joseph they would have to flee in haste through the desert to Egypt; when she lost for three days when he was 12, and she prepared for his three-day absence in the tomb two decades later; when she witnessed her fellow Nazarenes try to kill her Son by throwing him off a Nazareth promontory; when several of her relatives believed that Jesus was out of his mind; when the crowds hours earlier called for him to be crucified and chose Barabbas over him; when Jesus’ closest followers would all betray him and only one of them, moved by love, would return to be with her before him. Mary was hopeful because she, who wanted her whole life to develop according to the Lord’s word, was seeing that difficult word materialize before her.
- Similarly, besides Jesus, she was probably the only one who grasped how so many of the prophecies of the Old Testament were likewise being fulfilled on that limestone hill: that the Messiah would be a suffering servant, that he would be despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, betrayed by a close friend, falsely accused, taunted by his enemies, sold for 30 pieces of silver, led like a lamb to the slaughter, give his back to those who beat him and his cheeks to those who would pull out his beard, that his tongue would stick parched to the roof of his mouth, his hands and feet pierced, his clothes divided for a game of dice, ultimately wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our sins, so that we might be healed by his stripes. He was the fulfillment of the just man beset by evil doers, of Abel murdered by his brother, of Isaac who carried the wood for the sacrifice, of the Passover Lamb whose bones would not be broken, whose flesh would be eaten and whose blood would be wiped not on lintels but poured out on the whole world.
- And she was the one who understood and believed in her son’s words, given three times, that he would be betrayed, mocked, tortured, crucified and die, and on the third day rise again.
- That’s why she was there full of hope, embodying what should have been the hope of all Israelites, as well as all Jesus’ disciples. She, with her contemplative heart, put all of these words together like the pieces of a mosaic and grasped to it, knowing everything that was happening were tesserae in a masterpiece. She was there sharing in her Son’s sufferings full of hope that despite his being nailed to a perpendicular sign of contradiction, his crucifixion was in fact not a contradiction of the messianic prophecies at all, but a confirmation. As John Paul II said, on Calvary, she was not just a “witness to her Son’s Passion by her presence, [but was] a sharer in it by hercompassion,” making up what was lacking in her son’s afflictions for the sake of his body the Church. In response to his giving all, she gave all.
- Jesus wanted everyone to have a similar hope. That’s why he gave her to the beloved disciple to be his mother and in him the mother of all the living. Tradition has called her the Mater Spei, the mother of hope. We call her in the Salve Regina, “spes nostra,” and pray “Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. And she wants to enroll us in the school of hope that is the school of the cross. This is the way she seeks to mother us. Jesus had come in fact from heaven to earth to found a new family. He described what constituted that family when someone said that his mother and relatives were standing outside where Jesus was. Jesus responded, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Mary heard the Word of God and kept and treasured it so much that the Word literally took her flesh and dwelled in her among us. Just as she, by her yes in Nazareth three and a half decades earlier, had become the mother of God by giving the Lord his human body, so she at the foot of the Cross would now become the mother of that Son’s mystical body. And her mission was to help them trust in all the Messianic prophecies, all of what her Son had taught, all that he was doing for the human race at that very instant.
- Like Saint John, we’re called to receive her into our life like St. John, as beloved sons and daughters. As St. Josemaria Escriva said, “At the Cross, we find a mother with two sons, face to face. Christ and you.” St. John Paul II said that after hearing the words, “Behold your Mother” and receiving Jesus’ last testament of love, “John opened his house to Mary; … he welcomed her into his life, sharing with her a completely new spiritual closeness. The intimate bond with the mother of the Lord will lead the ‘beloved disciple’ to become the apostle of that Love that he sensed in the heart of Christ toward the immaculate heart of Mary. ‘Behold your mother!’ Jesus directs these words to each one of you. He asks you to take Mary into ‘your home,’ to welcome her among all you have, so that she who, by fulfilling her maternal ministry, may teach you and model for you what it means for ‘Christ to be fully formed in you.’ Mary will do this if you respond generously to the call of the Lord and persevere with faithfulness and joy to the Christian mission.” Christ our Hope wants to be fully formed in us and that happens through taking Mary into our home.
- So many have been buttressed by hope by drawing close to Mary on Calvary and taking her, there, into their life fully. St. Alphonus Ligouri, St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, the seven Holy Servite founders all were devote to Mary under the title of Our Lady of Sorrows and were strengthened to stand with her before the Son of Man when he entered into his kingdom.
- Blessed Pauline Jaricot, the foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, drew hope from Mary on Calvary and founded two years later the Living Rosary Association so that everyone could draw similar hope through the meditation on Mary, not just in the joyful and glorious mysteries but also the sorrow.
- John Paul II shows us that Marian hope, totally entrusting himself to her maternal care. Even when he was shot on her feast day in 1981, he confessed later that her maternal hand guided the bullet, which was a point blank kill shot by a trained assassin, so that it would not be fatal and so that he could help the entire church later cross the threshold of hope of the new millennium.
- We see that Marian maternal hope in Pope Francis. How touching it is his concrete devotion to Our Lady, that as soon as he was released from the Gemelli Hospital, he went directly to St. Mary Major to pray to Our Lady. He has plenty of Marian images where he lives at the Domus, especially the image of Our Lady Undoer of Knots, but he makes the extra effort out of love, because Mary fills him with hope.
- So we turn to her asking her to help us in the same way. In the words of the Stabat Mater, a few verses of which we are about to sing, the Church prays to her, “By the Cross with thee to stay, there with thee to weep and pray, is all I ask of thee to give.” Then we turn to Jesus and beg, “Christ, when Thou shalt call me hence, be Thy Mother my defense, by Thy Cross my victory.”
- Mary wants to help us remain with her up close to her Son, to recognize that his Cross is our victory. She stands next to us faithfully in our own crosses. We have confidence that Mary is interceding for us like she intervened for the couple in Cana, like she helped the early Church before Pentecost. She wants to help us become childlike grown-ups, like St. John, capable of remaining with her and Jesus through it all, faithful, beloved and loving, and hopeful to the end.
- And so we receive her as her Son’s last will and testament, his great and final bequeathal. We ask her to help us become full of hope as we turn to the Cross of her Son and pray, “Hail O Cross, beneath which we stand with Mary, our only Hope. Help us to lift high that Cross every day!”
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