A reading of the holy gospel according to John. Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clovis, and Mary Magna. See, there are three Marys there. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, Jesus said to his mother, woman, behold your son. And then he said to the disciple, behold your mother.
And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen. There's one thing we can say about sorrow or suffering. We don't like it, and we try to get rid of it when we have it and to avoid it when we don't have And we are faced here with a curious situation because while we are inclined, and this is a an extremely common denominator among all people that for one reason or other, for one motive or other, men and women, no matter what their religion may be as long as they have some and remember, first honest to god pagans all have religion.
This is one of the objects of prayer, to be freed of whatever is the pattern. If they had harvest, the drought, drought, too much of this, too little of that, and on and on and on down the midsley of all that can happen to derange and dissatisfied and to destroy human happiness and human life as we think of those things. And our blessed lord confirmed this attitude. He not only told us to pray to be delivered, but he gave us a dramatic example himself, which we totally forget, really. Totally forget this.
We can't we as I say, we are we are perfectly, completely, totally justified in praying to god to be freed of suffering, to be freed of tragedy, to be freed of sufferings, whatever they may be. Christ commanded us to do it. And then in his own life, he he gave us an example of doing it. But the part that we do not remember enough is the answer he got. Now the first reading today from Saint Paul's letter to the Hebrews emphasizes the obedience of Christ and how Christ prayed to his heavenly father to be freed of death, and he was freed of death.
Was he? Look at the cross. The most spectacular example we have of this is our lord's prayer in the garden. After the last supper, he goes down the Valley Of Hadron, he goes into the garden of olives across the valley from Jerusalem. And there, first, he has three faithful disciples who were very fairy in the last in the next few minutes to be utterly faithless.
So he leaves them alone and commands them to pray that they enter not into temptation. He commands them to pray, and, of course, they promptly go to sleep. Very human. Very human. But that's what they did.
Then he goes on, and apparently, our lord has a clear vision of what he of what is in store for him. And most of us realize how suffering, tragedy, sorrow, whatever, viewed in anticipation can be more painful, torturous than the reality. We all know that. That's the horrible character of fear. And so our blessed lord there has a vision of what he's going to face.
He's had this a long time. And he praised his heavenly father as eloquently, as dramatically, any words you wanna use, as sincerely as any human being could possibly pray. He was so apprised. He was so repelled. He was so in dread that I can't get the right words to describe this that we're told his sweat became his blood.
You know that phrase he sweated blood is no joke. To and he made his father to breathe, that he wouldn't have to do it. And these are his exact words that he prayed, let this chalice pass from me. Can you can you praise it any simpler than that? What happened?
Nothing. Nothing that he prayed for. What he prayed not to happen happened. In a sense, of course, what I've said is correct. In another sense, it's utterly wrong.
Because while it while every word I've said is true so far, what isn't true is what I've left out. See, this is the way you tell a big lie. You never tell a lie. That's dumb. See, the way you tell a real first class lie is to tell the incomplete truth.
Because the truth is that while Christ did throw himself completely on the mercy of his father, having a vision of what was going to happen to him, and he pleaded at bay till he sweat blood to be freed of this cup that he was about to drink, what did he finally say? Not my will, but thine be done. And there is what we forget. And then the next thing is what we forget, Christ on the cross. At least in the Garden Of Gethsemane, Christ had a consciousness of his father.
He had a consciousness that he was doing his father's will. And we all know the satisfaction of doing a difficult thing when we have a good first class motivation for doing it. You know that prayer, I I never use it. I don't use it very often. But the prayer at the wedding ceremony where in the at least the one I use, at the in at the introduction of the actual wedding, the marriage contract, where we say that that love is great and all this and that married life is bound to have extreme difficulties and that is going to demand extreme self sacrifice and unselfishness.
And then this sentence comes, but all of this, hard and difficult as it it may be the church is speaking from centuries of experience. As difficult as all this may be in married life, it can all be made easy by love. And so in the in the garden of Gethsemane, when Christ prays to his heavenly father to have not to have to drink this cup, and then he finds he has to drink it, he has already agreed to do it. He feels he's doing his father's will. If as a little child, he can feel his daddy patting him on the back and saying, son, you're doing you're doing swell.
Keep it keep it up. This is tough. This is this is awfully severe, but you're doing my will. Be happy with me. And if this is the this will work.
But what happens when you feel abandoned? What happens when you feel utterly alone? And you'll say, well, I guess I'm I'm an unbelieving Christian because I felt that way sometimes. I have gone down into the valley of death and couldn't see any sunlight on top of the mountain. And maybe the mountains weren't so high.
Maybe they were just little tiny hills, but I couldn't see any light. I was down in the trough. And you'll say, well, I guess I lost my faith. I'm not exaggerating this. And yet, you see what we're doing?
We're forgetting Christ. We're forgetting his mother standing by the cross of her son. Here we say we're we're today memorializing Our Lady of Sorrows. I don't know how much he understood or didn't I? Let that I know that she stood, and I like this and the the play I saw in over Abigail some years ago, this was emphasized.
You didn't have a weak woman running around full of tears and all distraught. You had a woman standing standing by the cross of her son. How much he knew what he was going through, I don't know. But we're told she stood by the cross of her son. She didn't faint.
She didn't wobble. She didn't wiggle out of it. She didn't run away. She wasn't completely lost or distraught or deranged. She stood by the cross of her son.
Think of this in terms of a mother standing on the gallows with her son about to be hanged, only worse. And here under these circumstances, Christ's prayer prayer, it's an exclamation of despair. My god. My god. Why have you abandoned me?
Abandoned me. That's how Christ felt on the cross. Are we any better? You see, we have a very romanticized idea of the cross and of suffering and of life and of what we have a right to expect from life. And much of this is being fueled today by this so called Christian Marxist.
And a lot of that is with us. We don't use those words. But this idea of making this world a a very comfortable, secure world and that it will and all anxiety, danger, suffering, death will be eliminated or we'll manage to get it out of our lives in some way or other. See, this is with us, and yet Christ never for a single minute or by a single word ever gave us grounds for such thinking. Quite the reverse.
He never asked us to make this life a hell on earth, but he talked about the kingdom of god, his kingdom, which he said is not of this world. And suffering and death and tragedy and sorrow, these are part of life. How do you handle them? Especially when they come home to oneself. And our blessed lord is our example.
And we can't go wrong. But you see, we forget we're human. And when we say that we're trying to follow Christ, let's keep Christ before us and to realize what he went through. And so while we pray and we're and and Christ commands us to pray and we'll follow our lord's example, we have to pray with this conclusion, not my will, but thy be done. And that's not the end.
That's not the. There's still the cross with Christ's last cry of desperation. My god, my god, why have you abandoned me? It can happen to all of us when we're on our cross.