How to do Holy Week: Mary is the Model

We should take Our Lady as our model every day, but during Holy Week, when She stood at the foot of Her Son's Cross, it is even more fitting.

From One Peter Five

By Suzanne Carrillo

This Holy Week, as we join spiritually in the cross of our Redeemer, let us keep the Blessed Virgin Mary as our model. 

We often hear our Lord’s words repeated: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but not always in the context of Our Lord’s Passion.  The fact is, our sins crucified Our Lord, and therefore afflicted Our Lady’s heart with unspeakable sorrow. Therefore Our Lord asks His Father to pardon our sins against His mother, too.

Many miracles were performed during Jesus’ time to prove his validity as the Messiah.  St. Alphonsus De Liguori teaches that God worked many miracles at a time when there weren’t many proofs of Him being the Son of God, so He furnished them.  The same is not true for us day, two thousand-plus years later.  There is no need for God to work miracles since now He requires us to see with the eyes of faith: “Blessed are those that have not seen and believe,” He said to the doubting Thomas.  Outside of those who have limited resources in far-distant countries, we cannot claim ignorance like those at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. We do know what we are doing and have chosen not to believe in Him or reject Him.

Is this not one of his greatest miracles: forgiving those who tormented His mother? And yet she becomes our model: taking us sinners as her own, and forgiving us too.

During Jesus’ Passion, while on His way to Golgotha —Calvary— after His first fall, is it any wonder He met with His mother next?  It was because she was His motivation to keep going.  Being God, He was never going to fail in the completion of reconciling humanity to His Father; that was the reason for His Incarnation.  But as we see in His Incarnation, He willed to come through Mary.  And it is because of Mary that He was determined to save mankind.  The love He bore for His only perfect creature, whom He chose as His mother, motivated Him – because she could not enter Heaven without His death.  Although He loved all the Saints awaiting their release into Heaven, He loved no one more than He loved His mother, Mary.  God willed that Mary participate in the Redemption.  She is the Co-Redemptrix, and anyone who rejects Her will not be admitted into Heaven, where she reigns with the Triune God as Queen of Heaven!

Let us this Holy Week ask Mary to accompany us in carrying our cross, following the bloody footsteps of Our Lord.  Let us also compassionate Her and Her Sorrows, for nothing will please Our Lord more.  It pained Him so much to see the agony in Mary’s face, for she would have died of sorrow had God not provided the grace to sustain Her during Her Son’s Passion. 

With John and the holy women, let us embrace this gift given to us: “Behold your Mother.” 

Let us also mortify our bodies by fasting as we contemplate the bruised and blood-stained face of Jesus, for we have too often indulged our sinful passions. 

Let us take Mary, our Mother, as our model, who lived only for Jesus.  Let us detach ourselves from creatures and love no one but God and all others through Him.

Do not believe the lie that since God died for our sins, there is nothing more for us to do.  God has always required participation in salvation history, and it is no different now.  We must live well to die well.  We must abandon sin, or else we will go to Hell.  Nothing should frighten us more than Hell and the fact that Our Lord said that most people would go there: “How narrow is the gate, and straight is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it.”  And as the Blessed Apostle declares: “Be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God.” 

There is no better advocate to assist us in accomplishing this than Mary!  Jesus calls us to love and honor her as He did.  “Honor your father and your mother.”

Sorrowful and immaculate heart of Mary, pray for us.