The soldier’s lance pierced Mary’s heart, Mary: Day 335

The soldier’s lance pierced Mary’s heart

The lance that opened Christ’s side passed through the soul of the Blessed Virgin, St. Alphonsus tells us, because her soul could never leave her Son’s heart.

So that the joy of the following Passover Sabbath wouldn’t be disturbed,

the Jewish leaders wanted the body of Jesus to be taken down from the Cross. This couldn’t be done unless the criminals were dead. So men came with iron bars to break our Lord’s legs, as they had already broken the legs of the two thieves who were crucified with him. Mary was still weeping over the death of her Son when she saw these armed men approaching her Jesus. At this sight she first trembled with fear, then she exclaimed: “My Son is already dead! Don’t commit any more outrages against him. I am his poor mother; don’t torment me anymore.”

She begged them, writes St. Bonaventure, not to break his legs. But as she said this—O God!—she saw a soldier brandish a lance and pierce the side of Jesus: “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (Jn 19:34). At the stroke of the spear the Cross shook and, as it was afterwards revealed to St. Bridget, the heart of Jesus was divided in two. “There came out blood and water”; for only a few drops of blood remained, and even those last few our Savior was pleased to shed, so we might understand that he had no more blood to give us.

The injury of that stroke was inflicted on Jesus, but Mary suffered its pain. “Christ,” says the devout Lanspergius, “shared this wound with his mother. He received the insult, but his mother endured its agony.” The holy Fathers of the Church insist that this was literally the sword foretold to the Blessed Virgin by St. Simeon: not a material sword, but a sword of grief, which pierced through her blessed soul in the heart of Jesus, where her soul always dwelled. As St. Bernard and others say: “The lance that opened Christ’s side passed through the soul of the Blessed Virgin, which could never leave her Son’s heart.”

—St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Jesus is the second “Adam” (see 1 Cor 15:45), the Head of the new, redeemed creation, just as the first Adam was the head of the old, fallen creation. Eve, the wife of the first Adam, was created from his side. So why does the Church see in the blood and water flowing from Jesus’ pierced side a symbol of the Church?

CLOSING PRAYER

Mary, pray for me, so that the suffering of your Son, through the cleansing water of my Baptism and his precious Blood in the Eucharist, may bathe my heart and purify it.

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