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Liturgical Readings of the season from the votive Mass of the Lenten season: ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary: Mother of Reconciliation’

Jesus was infinitely alone yet not alone. Mary, his mother, was there with the small community of the beloved disciple and some women (cf. John 19:25-27). This was the moment when tradition holds that the Church was born of the open wound of Christ on the cross.

But why all this? Clearly, to be reconciled with God (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:20). In contemplating the utter misery of the God-man’s suffering, we are invited to remember that we are to be washed clean and to share in the suffering. No one is spared the decision-making and the journey. No one is exempt from sin, sorrow and misery, from the things that isolate and divide.

In Christ, the old things are to pass away, these things of sin. St. Paul tells the Corinthians:

Whoever is in Christ is a new creation:
the old things have passed away;
behold, new things have come.
And all this is from God,
who has reconciled us to himself through Christ
and given us the ministry of reconciliation …
So we are ambassadors for Christ,
as if God were appealing through us.
We implore you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God.
For our sake God made Christ to be sin who did not know sin, so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:17-20).

The liturgy asks us to become persons of reconciliation. The introduction to the Marian liturgy states:

The Church has with ever greater clarity acknowledged the role of our Lady in reconciling sinners with God. The fathers of the Church in the early centuries, in discussing the mystery of the incarnation of the Word, speak frequently of the virginal womb of the mother of the Lord as the place where peace between God and the human race came to be.

Popular devotion has long remembered this peace of Mary, the woman who gave birth to the Redeemer. She held him in her arms at his birth; tradition has it that he was placed in her arms at his death. She is reconciled to the Father’s will. As time went on, Mary was called a refuge where the miserable could find consolation. Not only is she called Mother of Reconciliation; she is also called Refuge of Sinners. The sinner and the miserable find refuge in her peace.

– Excerpted from Lenten Weekly Meditations by Sr. M. Jean Frisk, I.S.S.M. included on the All About Mary website.

_{Image: Detail of “Pieta” by Roman Turovsky. From the Marian Library Art and Artifacts Collection.}