Offering and Suffering with Mary

Offering to God with Mary

To offer to God, from whom we all receive everything, is the primordial act of human history and of life. To offer Him the first fruits is an acknowledgment of His sovereignty over creation, in all religions. In Israel, this was recalled by the table of the showbread in the temple and by the offering of the first fruits of the harvests and of the firstborn of man and of animals.

To offer to God chosen victims in a sacrifice of honor or in expiation for sins is likewise common to all religions. In Israel the great day of atonement was, and still is, solemn: on it, with the blood of the victims offered in sacrifice, the sins of the people were expiated and the sacred places and objects were purified. Although, the Letter to the Hebrews observes, “it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins” (Heb 10:4).

The Holy Spirit soon taught Israel that the offering and the sacrifice pleasing to God, more than the blood of animals, is the heart of man: “a broken spirit is a sacrifice to God. A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise” (Ps 51:17).

Azariah in the furnace in Babylon prayed: “may we be received with a contrite heart and a humble spirit, as with holocausts of rams and of bulls, as with thousands of fat lambs. Such be our sacrifice before You today, and may it be pleasing to You” (Dan 3:38-39). For this reason the Only-Begotten Son, on entering the world, making the words of the psalm His own, says to the Father: “You desired neither sacrifice nor offering, but You prepared a body for me. Holocausts and sacrifices for sin did not please You. Then I said: Here I am… to do, O God, Your will” (Heb 10:5-7).

For this reason the Father, in His merciful love, sent His Son into the world as “the propitiation for our sins. And not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (1 Jn 2:2. 4:10). Thus, “the whole life of Christ is an offering to the Father” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 606), in obedience to His will. A free offering that led Him to give Himself voluntarily on the cross for the life of all; and of this voluntary offering of Himself to the Father, the Eucharist is the perennial memorial.

Mary and the offering to God

To offer presupposes that one has something of one’s own to offer; one does not offer things that are not one’s own. Now, we offer what we receive from God as though it were ours. The first and fundamental gift He gave us is life. Life is ours insofar as He gave it to us to be ours, while reserving to Himself the divine right of ownership.

For this reason, all of us must render an account to Him of how we have lived it or have not lived it. Mary, all beautiful and pure, without any stain of sin, and full of the grace of the Holy Spirit from the first instant of her conception, and therefore worthy to offer herself to God as an oblation pleasing to Him, offered herself to God as a virgin from the first beats of her existence, to be wholly and only His, according to His divine designs.

Life, prayer, flames of love, even in the simplicity of her daily life, rose to the throne of God and drew the Redeemer Son down to earth. But when she clothed with her immaculate flesh and her most pure blood the Word who came down to her and was made flesh of her by the work of the Holy Spirit, Mary became the first and incomparable one to offer to the Father the incarnate Son, the eternal Son of the Father, born in time of her by the action of the Holy Spirit. Yet with what tremulous virginal love, with what deep and inimitable adoration, with what filial boldness to obtain for the whole world every gift of light and of life, in Christ, did she become the living offertory of the Savior for the world that was to be saved!

An offering Virgin not only at the moment of the presentation of Jesus in the temple, but at every instant of the long years spent with Him, to the rhythm of her virginal heart, she offered Him. With Him, humble, she also offered herself to the Father, up to the great Offering of Calvary, where, to fulfill the divine will, she united her whole being to the bloody Offering of the Redeemer Son. And she continues to offer Him, for all, hidden and present on every altar of the earth.

We like Mary and with Mary

To offer first of all ourselves, “like” Mary and “with” Mary, begging first of all to be purified of the many stains that soil us, so that we may become a pure offering, pleasing to God, in the Holy Spirit, as we ask in the third Eucharistic Prayer: “May the Holy Spirit make of us an everlasting sacrifice pleasing to You”.

For, especially during the eucharistic celebration, all, ministers and faithful, are called to give thanks to God and to offer not only the immaculate host, but also themselves to God (Sacrosanctum Concilium 48). Indeed, all, according to the diversity of the gift, are consecrated by the Spirit as priests of the Most High God for the salvation of the world.

Offering the day

After the sleep of the night, when our eyes open to the new day, we should imitate the birds that sing at the top of their voices the praises of their Creator, and bless Him with their flights and their harmonious songs. A thanksgiving that is immediately transformed into an offering, the offering of the new day to Him who gives it to us.

For every day of life is a gift, and every new day is a new gift added to an unbroken chain of gifts that the Lord gives us. Every mother teaches her child to give thanks to whoever offers a gift. So Mary teaches us to begin our day by turning our grateful mind to the Giver of every gift, and offering Him, into her maternal hands, all the actions that will form the fabric of the day now opening.

The Church also teaches us to confirm our thanksgiving with an act of faith, of hope and of charity. But in order to thank the Lord better, and to offer Him less unworthily our day and that of all the men who are on earth and whom He loves, it is so beautiful and so pleasing to God that we should place everything and everyone in the Heart of the blessed Mother, and with her filial and maternal sentiments give back to the Giver the gift that He makes us.

We can thus begin the day with this act of offering:

“Father who art in heaven, through Jesus Christ Your Son in the Holy Spirit I adore You, I love You and I thank You for the gift of this new day. Into the immaculate hands of Mary, our Mother, I offer You the intentions, the actions, the sufferings of my own and of all Your children upon the earth. Grant that they may be according to Your will, for the glory of Your name, for the salvation of the world. Amen”

During the day

During the day there will be no lack of ways to offer: the actions we carry out in accordance with the will of God, each one according to the condition and the situation he is called to live daily, at home, while traveling, at work, wherever divine providence asks us to be. And to offer in a special way the troublesome things that afflict us, whether in the body, or in the heart, or in human relations. And to offer them not only for ourselves, but for all, beginning with those dearest and closest to us, so as to widen the horizon to many other brothers and sisters of the world who form the human family with us. Also for those who have already left the earth for eternity, and who perhaps await precisely from us, into the hands of Mary who is their Mother too, a thought of ours, a prayer, the offering of a small but very valuable sacrifice.

This is what Pope Benedict XVI exhorts us to do, in his encyclical on Christian hope Spe salvi (no. 40):

“I would like to add one further small note, not entirely irrelevant to the events of every day. Part of a form of devotion, perhaps less practiced today, but not long ago still rather widespread, was the thought of being able to ‘offer up’ the small efforts of daily life, which always strike us anew like more or less troublesome jabs, thus giving them a meaning… Those people were convinced that they could insert their small efforts into the great suffering of Christ, and that these thus entered in some way into the treasury of compassion that humanity needs. In this way, even the small annoyances of daily life could acquire a meaning and contribute to the economy of good, of love among men. Perhaps we really ought to ask ourselves whether such a thing might not once again become a sensible perspective for us as well”.

Moreover, the Council teaches us:

“The laity, being dedicated to Christ and consecrated by the Holy Spirit, are in a marvelous way called and prepared to produce ever more abundant fruits of the Spirit. Indeed, all their activities, prayers and apostolic undertakings, married and family life, daily work, spiritual and bodily relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne, become spiritual offerings pleasing to God through Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Pet 2:5)”

Lumen Gentium 34.

Offering sufferings and acts of goodness

In this oblative context, we could also include the offering of the labors and the sufferings of many others of our brothers and sisters; I think with admiration of a physician who at the bedside of his sick acts also as a priest as well as a physician, and so we become, with Mary in the Church, offerers of Christ, who still suffers in His members.

To gather all the acts of goodness that men express every day, knowing that the paschal mystery of Christ reaches every man, and that no goodness is born from man alone, if it has not first been inspired by God. There is no man in the world so wicked, so immersed in the darkness of evil, that there do not remain in him at least reflections of the divine light, which created us in His image. To gather everything, as Jesus said to the apostles after the prodigious multiplication of the loaves: “Gather up the fragments that are left over, so that nothing may be lost” (Jn 6:12), and to make of it baskets to present to the Lord, into the hands of the Mother of all men.

Offering Jesus to the Father with Mary

If before God, who loves us as a Father of immense mercy, even the gift, so small and almost insignificant, of each action of His children has such great value, what value will the offering acquire in His eyes that His Son carried out throughout His whole existence on earth, up to the supreme sacrifice of the Cross, and which He left as memorial and gift to His Church?

To offer Jesus in the eucharistic sacrifice, to offer Jesus present as victim on every altar and in every tabernacle of the earth! Now, it is precisely “with” Mary that we must make the offering of the Son of God to the Father. Indeed, that Son is hers. She can and must offer Him unceasingly, with a Mother’s right, to the Father for all, since for all she received Him when He came down from heaven and for all she offered Him from the first instant of His conception until, dead, she clasped Him in her arms, in order to give to the world, in the blood poured out and in her Mother’s tears, the price of reconciliation and of forgiveness.

Thus, when passing beside a church or a holy place where He is really present in the tabernacle, each one should grow accustomed to adoring His hidden presence, and, almost prolonging the eucharistic celebration, to offering Him with Mary to the Father for the salvation of all.

Suffering with Mary
The value of every suffering

If each of our actions, inspired by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us from the moment of our baptism, has a value to be offered, in Christ, to the Father for all, suffering has a singularity of its own.

Indeed, it was by His passion and death that Jesus redeemed the world, and by her compassion and sorrow the Virgin became His generous associate in the work of salvation. Every suffering, physical, moral, spiritual, entered the world because of sin. For this reason the Son of God, the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, became the man of sorrows described by Isaiah (Is 52-53), upon whom God made the sin and the sorrows of humanity weigh.

Therefore, in Him and in His voluntary passion and death, every sorrow was redeemed and became a participation in His redemptive passion. Thus the “gospel of suffering,” which enfolds the earth, creates mysterious bonds with Him whom God made “sin” for all, in order to give mercy to all. “It was fitting, indeed, that God, through whom and for whom all things exist, He who leads many sons to glory, should make perfect through suffering the leader who guides to salvation” (Heb 2:10).

Woman of sorrows

Mary is the woman of sorrow: a silent, deep sorrow, at times heartrending, as when Jesus was lost in the temple and on her Holy Saturday, consummated in obedience to the will of the Father with Christ, united to His human and divine suffering, a reflection of His ineffable afflictions, com-passion with His passion: always accepted out of love for us.

Beside the crucified Son she stood, bitterly co-suffering with Him (Lumen Gentium 58). Her life on earth, at least from the day of the Presentation of Jesus in the temple, was a continual martyrdom, not of the body, but of the heart and of the spirit: “and a sword will pierce your own soul” (Lk 2:35).

As Saint John Paul II taught us:

“No one has experienced, as the Mother of the Crucified One did, the mystery of the cross, the shocking encounter of transcendent divine justice with love… No one like her, Mary, has received into her heart that mystery: that truly divine dimension of the redemption accomplished on Calvary by the death of the Son, together with the sacrifice of her mother’s heart, together with her definitive ‘fiat’”.

Dives in misericordia, no. 9

We with Mary and like Mary

“As for me, may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal 6:14), said Saint Paul, adding: “now I rejoice in the afflictions I endure for you, and I complete in my flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the Church” (Col 1:24). It is not easy to accept suffering, whether of the body or of the heart: it is one thing to speak, another to suffer.

But it is precisely the Lord and His sorrowful Mother who give “meaning” to suffering, which in any case remains a mystery and reveals itself to each one, from time to time, in a unique way. We must hold firmly in mind that nothing happens without a design of God and that every suffering, uniting us in a mysterious way to the suffering Christ, has a “deep meaning” and makes us participants with Him and in Him in the redemption of humanity.

Like Mary, many saints embraced sufferings that were even atrocious, in order to cooperate with the design of the Father, who wills all to be saved in the blood of the Son, and to imitate His passion: “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in His steps” (1 Pet 2:21). To suffer for others, imitating Jesus and the Virgin, is a sign of hope and an encouragement to face, obedient and silent like Mary, the sorrows that the will of God prepares for us, up to the supreme sorrow of death. “Father, if it is possible, let this chalice pass from me! Yet not as I will, but as You will!” (Mt 26:39).

It is a consolation for the faithful to know that nothing is lost, that suffering is not useless; rather, that with it we can make the most valuable act of offering for so very many people known or unknown, and collaborate “with Mary” in the salvation of the world.

The words of Pope Benedict XVI, in the encyclical Spe salvi (no. 39), reassure us:

“To suffer with the other, for others… Man has so great a value for God that He Himself became man in order to be able to suffer with man in a very real way, in flesh and blood, as is shown to us in the narrative of the Passion of Jesus. Since then, into every human suffering there has entered Someone who shares the suffering and the bearing of it. Since then, in every suffering consolation spreads, the consolation of God’s participating love, and so the star of hope is born”.

And Jesus Himself, confirming the disciples of Emmaus in the faith after the resurrection, affirms about Himself: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things to enter into His glory? And, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them what referred to Him in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:26-27).

The dimension of offering and of suffering with Mary finds a profound echo in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater of John Paul II, which presents Mary as a companion on the way of the cross.

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