When Your Eyes Met

When Your Eyes Met

She merited to be the first to see You, because she loved You and longed for You, because she had believed in You and had never doubted Your word.

                                                                        Thomas A Kempis

            The Angel Gabriel announced the news to you. You gave your consent. You were the first to hear the news of the Messiah come to be with humanity. The salvation of mankind was near at hand.

            How gentle, how joyful, how awed was your glance at the Infant Savior newly born, in your arms. When your eyes met His, a knowing gaze you shared, the knowing that God was fulfilling His promise to Adam and Eve to undo their sin and return humankind to Himself. The growing years, quite appropriately hidden, must have held treasures that you shared with the God-boy. God and boy. Two natures in your Son.

A yearly pilgrimage to the temple, Jesus on the cusp of manhood by Jewish standards, brought three anxious, worry-filled days. Three days He was lost to you. Three days that foreshadowed three days hidden in the tomb.

            However, anxiety trailed, and in its wake wonder, gratitude, and relief—a most generous reward from your Heavenly Spouse—greeted you and Joseph when you found your Son in the temple conversing with and listening to the teachers. His Father’s work. Your eyes met the eyes of God in the youthful eyes of Your Son. The Son of God—God Himself. When your eyes met His, you knew the message in that glance. “I am and will be safe until my hour comes. My Father sends His angels to protect Me. You can relax your vigil and enjoy watching Me grow, enjoy just being with Me.”

Yet God though He was, He returned to be obedient to you and St. Joseph. The precious moments within your family as you watched Him grow, as the depth of His divinity became gradually more apparent to you, as He revealed bit by little bit the secrets that God wished mankind to know and the secrets of His redemptive mission. What tenderness and love must have filled your humble home.

            When your eyes met at Cana, the true conversation lay hidden from those around.

            “Son, they have no wine.” Your motherly notice to spare the couple an embarrassment.

            “Woman, what is this to Me?”

            Woman, not mother. Woman, the name given to Eve before the fall, before her sin. Woman, the title by which your Son declared you as the New Eve. Her, the mother of sin. You, the mother of redemption, the sinless mother. Your request that your Son work His first public miracle, and His reply had a much deeper meaning. Your eyes met His in that knowing.

            “Son, it is time for You to start Your mission.”

            “Woman. Do you know that you are asking Me to start My journey to the Cross, to My death for the redemption of mankind? Do you know that you are calling Me to the pain that I will endure and the suffering that this will cause you? Are you really ready for this?”

            “Yes, my Son. I know.”

“Do what He tells you.”

            From the shadows, you followed and supported Him along His journey. What love and compassion God the Father has for His Son, that He would create such a mother to accompany Him. What pride, what gratitude, what knowing was present in quickened glances into each other’s eyes, as He pursued His mission of redemption. Yet in all of this, Mother of God, Mother of the Savior though you are, ever humble you kept this unfathomable secret hidden in your heart. You pondered all these things in your heart.

            Mary, how very broken must have been your maternal heart when you saw your Son—infinite Innocence--suffer and die His most hideous death on the cross. The Child whom you carried joyously for nine months tucked safely in your womb and the exuberance at seeing and holding Him for the first time—your Son, God’s Son, your Savior and ours. The Child whom you watched mature and grow into manhood. Now to accompany Him and watch Him undergo the most humiliating, traumatic, and painful death imaginable.

During His growth through childhood into manhood, your joys were magnified since you were created as God’s masterpiece, created without original sin. You had no sin. You were spared that part of our human nature. Thus, you felt your emotions totally and completely. Because the veil of original sin was spared you, you encountered Heaven itself with all of its angelic spirits, with God the Father and the Holy Spirit themselves, relishing and taking pride in the God-man walking the Earth on His path of fulfilling God the Father’s plan for humanity.

            Just as your joy was perfect, so also was your sorrow perfect. In your immaculate heart, you coupled with Jesus’ passion and death, with His pain and suffering. Your sorrow at watching your Son being tried, convicted, scourged, and crucified was deep and infinite. It was far greater than any other human could endure. No other human mother could bear such intense tribulation as was yours. How unfathomably difficult it must have been to look into that innocent, divine face, bloodied and tormented from His passion and crucifixion. In the midst of this horrific suffering, how glorious was the honor that your Son bestowed on you, “Woman, behold your son”—giving you to us as our mother.

Conflicted thoughts and emotions crisscrossed through your sinless being as you held and cradled your lifeless Son’s body, caressing that soft, sweet face, His head marred by the torturous crown of thorns. The flames of the joy of redemption being won became tangled with loss—a voice you can no longer hear, a hug you can no longer feel. His eyes now closed in death, your eyes could not meet His. You cradled your Son as tenderly as you did His life-filled infant body. All of the years of profound joy now mingled with the infinite, supreme grief that you felt over the three days that Jesus’ body lay in the tomb. Yet such profound relief and exuberance at the end of His pain and the completion of His redemptive mission.

            Being spared the veil of original sin, you must have known and completely understood Jesus’ mission and that He was going to rise. How could your Spouse have kept such a secret from you? And, being joined to your God-spouse, it seems that you would have known what He knew about your Son. Jesus is with His Father, and He is going to rise and ascend to His Father. That, also, was His mission.

You knew and fully understood why Your Son must undergo such excruciating pain and death—because of God’s total, infinite love and mercy for humanity. You allowed and became one with your Son’s agony because of your intense motherly love and mercy for humanity—for me. For us, you became immersed in sorrow with the pain and salvific mission of His passion and death.

            Even though the Bible makes no mention of it, I believe that Jesus, after His Resurrection, came to you first. And when your eyes met, how immense was your joy and how infinite was your love for your Son. Oh, that embrace, the bond engulfed in your Son’s hug, a divine bond that only you and Your Son could share throughout eternity. What ecstasy you felt with your God-Son at that moment. God’s plan of salvation was now consummated. Perhaps the Bible doesn’t mention this meeting because it was meant to stay private, the cherished moment that you would ponder in your heart for all eternity.

            How precious must have been the moments when your eyes met.

What indescribable joy poured in upon Mary, Your mother, at that sacred moment when she saw You, her Son, clothed in resplendent light and with a glorious body brighter than the sun and more beautiful than all the stars! With what indescribable joy did her spirit exult in You, Jesus, God, her Savior, more than in all the other days of her earthly life.

                                                                        Thomas A Kempis

                                                                        The Imitation of Mary