Eastertide And The Blessed Virgin Mary

By JAMES MONTI

Each year, whether Easter comes early or late, the Easter season that follows always continues well into May and often beyond it. There is in this a happy convergence, casting the month of Mary in the splendid spring light of the Resurrection. Even before May begins, from Easter Sunday onward, the Church daily turns to the Blessed Virgin to invite her to rejoice anew in the Resurrection with the singing of the Paschal antiphon Regina Caeli.
As a liturgical chant, this antiphon can only be traced back as far as the twelfth century, yet it implicitly evokes a tradition that can be traced back much earlier — the belief that our Lord following His Resurrection revealed Himself first to His Mother. This tradition in turn points to the reality that our Lady was as much a participant in her divine Son’s Paschal Mystery as she had been in the events surrounding His Incarnation, a reality summed up by the simple statement of St. John in his Gospel, “But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister” (John 19:25).
The Gospels provide only three succinct points of reference with regard to the role of the Blessed Virgin in the events of Holy Week and Easter: Simeon’s prophecy that her soul would be pierced by a sword (Luke 2:35), her presence on Calvary when by the words of Christ she was declared the Mother of us all (John 19:25-27), and her presence with the apostles at Pentecost (Acts 1:14).
These three references certainly suggest that much has been left unsaid. Turning to the traditions enshrined in popular devotions as well as in sacred art, we find a bit more — not only the belief that Mary was the first witness of the Risen Christ, but also that on Good Friday she met Him as He carried His cross to Golgotha and after His death took Him into her arms as depicted in Michelangelo’s Pieta. We have all seen the Pieta countless times in photos and reproductions, but perhaps we have never paused to consider whether this moving scene is simply a matter of pious conjecture, or if instead it is the artistic realization of an ancient tradition regarding the death of Christ.
The answer is to be found in a seventh-century text, written in the Georgian language, an account of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, attributed to the pen of the eastern abbot St. Maximus the Confessor (+662). Like other early texts of a non-scriptural nature that purport to present the missing details about the life of Christ and our Lady, the veracity of what this biography of Mary relates is by no means certain. Yet much of what it describes with regard to the Passion and the Resurrection not only has a ring of authenticity about it, but also shows evidence of having exercised a deep and lasting influence upon devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary in both the West and the East.
While the Georgian language version of this ancient “biography” of Mary would not have circulated widely due to the language barrier, the original text would have been in Greek and therefore far more capable of a wide dissemination. And it is in two Greek Holy Week homilies of the ninth century eastern bishop George of Nicomedia that so much of what the ancient Marian biography says of Mary’s role in the Passion and Resurrection has been preserved and handed down outside of Georgia.
What especially emerges is a story of the Blessed Virgin’s constant and highly attentive presence throughout the Passion, present at every event from Palm Sunday to the Resurrection, remaining with Christ even after the apostles had fled from Him.
The seventh century Life of the Virgin speaks with passionate intensity about what the Blessed Virgin would have felt in beholding Christ nailed to the cross. Addressing Mary, the author observes, “. . . streams of blood came down from his incorruptible wounds, but fountains of tears came down from your eyes” (quoted in Stephen Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, East and West: Maternal Compassion and Affective Piety in the Earliest Life of the Virgin and the High Middle Ages,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., volume 62, part 2, October 2011, p. 580). The text recounts that when following the death of our Lord His side was pierced with a spear, the Blessed Virgin rushed to the foot of the cross; it would have been a scene comparable to that of St. Mary Magdalen clutching the base of the cross as depicted countless times in paintings of the crucifixion.
Significantly, there is at least one painting of the fifteenth century, a work attributed to Roger van der Weyden or his school of Flemish artists (Crucifixion, ca. 1438-1440, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), that depicts our Lady instead of Mary Magdalen wrapping her arms around the foot of the cross as she gazes up at her divine Son, her face and veil spattered with His Precious Blood.
The ancient biography of Mary, echoed in George of Nicomedia’s two Holy Week homilies, presents the Blessed Virgin as highly pro-active in arranging the burial of her divine Son, and it is from this part of the account that the subsequent medieval and Renaissance imagery of the Pieta seems to have emerged. Mary is described as anxiously searching around Calvary to find a suitable resting place for the Body of Christ, all the while constantly glancing back upon Him, intent not to be separated from Him even for a moment.
Joseph of Arimathea is presented as going to Pilate at our Lady’s request to obtain her Son’s Body. With her own hands Mary assists with the taking down of Christ’s Body from the cross, and when the body has been lowered to the ground she takes Him into her arms. Holding His body thus, “she watered it with her most fervent tears” (George of Nicomedia, Homily 8 [homily for Good Friday], Patrologia Graeca, volume 100, columns 1487-1488). This is the moment of Good Friday expressed in Michelangelo’s Pieta. And upon Mary’s lips, at this moment, the ancient Life of the Virgin and George of Nicomedia place a profound lament:
“Behold, O Lord, in Thee the mystery is accomplished, which had been preordained. . . . Lo, Thy indescribable patience is revealed to the eyes of all. For now you who bestow all life lie corporally without life. I hold and embrace the lifeless body of the Author of the life of all — of Him, I say, who preserves my life. I hold Him now bereft of breath Whom not long ago I cherished thus in my arms as my dearest Child, whose most sweet words I heard, whose life abounding in sermons I gloried in. I kiss the wounded and motionless members of Him who has been wounded for the healing of all. I press closed the lips now mute and silent of Him who created all nature endowed with the faculty of speech and reason, who set man upon the earth as a talking being. I kiss the closed eyes of Him who invented the faculty of sight, who by Thy command alone bestowed light upon the eyes of the blind.
“But would that it were granted to me to hear Thy most sweet voice now! Would that it were granted to me now to see you uttering anything! Would that it were granted to me to take in Thy delectable words again! Although truly it is not permitted now, yet I am going to see you all the sooner in Thy resurrection, when happily announcing the restoration of men, you speak to Thy Mother things dearer still” (George of Nicomedia, Homily 8 [homily for Good Friday], Patrologia Graecae, volume 100, columns 1487-1488).

The First Witness

Among the most significant assertions in the ancient Life of the Virgin is its claim that when following the burial of Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, John, Mary Magdalen, and the other holy women had all departed, the Blessed Virgin stayed at the Tomb, keeping a solitary watch there until the resurrection of her Divine Son. She is described as observing a constant vigil of uninterrupted prayer on her knees, “with the unsleeping eyes of the soul and the body” (quoted in Shoemaker, “Mary at the Cross, p. 583).
One can see in this ancient belief as to how the Blessed Virgin spent the interval from Christ’s death until His resurrection a plausible source of inspiration for the development of the medieval custom of keeping a continual watch of prayer from Good Friday until Easter Sunday morning at a representation of the Lord’s tomb, a practice that in the west first arose in the tenth century. In Jerusalem there is mention of a continual prayer vigil at the site of the Holy Sepulcher on Good Friday night in both the fourth century Pilgrimage Diary of Egeria and the tenth century Typicon of the Anastasis.
It also seems quite plausible that such a tradition of Mary remaining at the Tomb through Holy Saturday could have contributed to the emergence of Saturday as a day of special commemoration of the Blessed Virgin in the sacred liturgy, an association bolstered by the longstanding explanation of the veneration of Mary on Saturdays as a remembrance of her unswerving faith in her divine Son during the interval from His death to His resurrection, as St. Thomas Aquinas and others attest.
With the seventh century Life of the Virgin placing our Lady continually at the Tomb for the entire span of the Easter Triduum, it naturally follows that she would become the first to see our Lord following His Resurrection. She is described as witnessing the earthquake on Easter morning, and the rolling back of the stone, and becomes the first witness of the Resurrection.
In the Latin West, from the thirteenth century onward, this Easter Sunday tradition took a different form wherein our Lady would come to be depicted as “at home,” rather than at the Tomb, when the Risen Christ appeared to her. Yet the earlier tradition of Mary’s vigil at the Holy Sepulcher does appear in one widely circulated Western text, the fourteenth-century Pelerinage de Jesus-Christ of Guillaume de Deguileville, a French Cistercian monk.
George of Nicomedia speaks of the moment when our Lady first saw her Divine Son risen from the dead as a stunningly beautiful scene of apocalyptic glory, whereas medieval Western accounts envision this as a very intimate Mother-and-Son reunion. What is certain is that it was for our Lady — and is for us too — a moment of unutterable joy: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22).