Christ Church Rockville Lenten Devotion

Wisdom 1:16––2:1, 12-22 1
Peter 1:10-20
John 13:36-38 or Gen. 22:1-14
John 19:38-42

John 19:38-42
After these things, Joseph of Arimathea…asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body.

Noticeably absent from the Biblical story, however, is the tradition that found its way into some of the world’s great sculpture and paintings: the depiction of Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding the body of her murdered son on her lap. It is known as “the Pieta,” which is the Italian word for “pity.” I find myself today with Mary, in stone-cold grief, trying to imagine what she, or any mother, feels upon suffering the death of her child.
For many reasons too numerous to mention here, I am not an admirer of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, which was released a number of years ago. And yet, there is one scene in that movie that reduces me to sorrow and tears, and stands out above all others. It shows Mary watching as Jesus is making his way to Calvary, carrying his cross, bloody and exhausted after being savagely scourged. He stumbles, and she suddenly experiences a mental flashback of watching him as a young child, running toward her but then stumbling in the process. Then she was able to take him in her arms and hold him and comfort him—but now she is helpless, and the camera restores us to the present moment, as we see her face with an expression of overwhelming grief.
I invite you into Mary’s sorrow this day— and into that feeling of life out of control. Many of us are living out these days in a place of fear, as we watch controversial decisions being made in our nation and in the world. Good Friday brings us to a place of helplessness—the One whose goodness and grace we are called to bring to birth in the world is being cruelly slaughtered, and we can only watch, and hold his brokenness in our laps, and wait…having the good fortune to know that the story is not ended, and Sunday’s on its way.
Let me share with you the English translation of “Pieta,” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s cycle of poems entitled Das Marienleben (the Life of Mary):

Now is my misery full. Unutterably
it fills me. I am numb, as stone
is numb inside.
Hard as I am, only one thing I know:
You grew
…and grew,
as if on purpose to stand forth
as agony too vast
for my heart to seize and hold,
Now you lie across my lap—
Now I can no more
give birth to you.
(tr. Bernard Jacobson)
Lord, have mercy on us all.

— The Rev. John S. McDuffie

Holy Week & Easter Schedule

We have services throughout Holy Week and on Easter Sunday.

View Schedule
×