This image is from the Saturday night Mass before Easter, Sabato Santo, which follows Giovedi Santo, Venerdi Santo and proceeds Pasqua – Easter. The whole Lenten period is lived with a greater consciousness of good and evil, of right and wrong, of despair and hope, of suffering and resurrection. As it happens, this Easter period was one in which my brother-in-law Stefano seemed to embody so many of the things we think about now. He has been fighting cancer and had his Doctor’s appointment the Friday before Easter to find out the results of his latest PET scan. It came out clear; he is fine. I thought back to the past year and a half, his suffering certainly a heavy cross for him to bear. At one point, lying on the sofa, with his feeding tube threaded down his nose, weakened and shrunk by heavy doses of chemotherapy and radiation, he looked at me with world-weary eyes and said “I think I would rather have died”. But he came through, and he still carries the heaviest cross of all, the death of his oldest son in a car accident.
The death of a son – on Good Friday one can only think of Jesus and Mary. The power of maternal love, the power of ultimate sacrifice for mankind’s redemption.
As a mother myself, her example is one of one of such strength and tenderness, faith and hope. Pope John Paul said “May each one of us, precisely through the concrete reality of Mary’s universal motherhood, fully acknowledge her as our own mother and trustingly commend ourselves to her maternal love”.
Love is Jesus’ message. That is why our Saturday evening Mass is my favorite Mass of the entire period. We stand in the cobblestoned piazza of our little village church, in the pitch-black of the night, and we light a fire to symbolize that there is light in darkness. Pope Francesco said on Good Friday that Jesus on the Cross teaches us that the last word shall not be “il male” – which in Italian can mean ‘bad’ in a general sweeping way, which is how I prefer it, also is translated as evil,so again, the last word shall not be “il male” but love, mercy and pardon. There are things going on in our life right now that make me pray that those always will be the last words.