Rosary Meditations

Reflections on the Sorrowful Mysteries by Gregory Peebles, CMJ Companion

The First Sorrowful Mystery: The Agony in the Garden

The first sorrowful mystery is not about sweat like blood. It is about having an inkling of something very bad coming, and still trusting in God.

In the garden, Jesus tells the truth. He speaks his desire to avoid suffering. This — along with the cry from the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”) — is the moment where we might encounter a Jesus we can understand, where the mythical archetype falls away, and the human becomes legible.

We cannot do what Jesus did, but we can pray, “Not my will, but yours.”

The agony in the garden is one of the hinges on the door that opens what we call “salvation,” a concept too big and overburdened to talk about meaningfully here. But this moment represents a place where divine will and human will kiss each other very gently  — a kiss that, just a little later in the story, the betrayal will pervert.

Before we begin to pray with Mary, one final thought.

A few years ago, as it sometimes does, the Feast of the Annunciation — when the Angel announces to Mary that she will bear the one whose coming-into-being will cost her everything, and when Mary consents — fell during Holy Week.

When this happens, for the sake of preserving the integrity of Holy Week, the church moves the celebration until after Easter. It is sensible, but, in my opinion, a luminous possibility gets lost.

Our creation story begins in a garden. In that garden, humans choose not to live exclusively within the will of God. If we think about it very much at all, it ought not to surprise us that the gospels tell us that Jesus, who renews creation, started doing so in a garden and by verbalizing consent to God's will. But, as a person of strong Marian devotion, I feel compelled to remind us that the consent Jesus offered in Gethsemane parallels another we know of in the story of the Incarnation.

Long before Christ kneels among the olive trees, Mary stands at her own threshold before a future she did not plan — and perhaps did not desire. Her question, “How can this be?” pivots to “Let it be done to me according to your word.” 

In the garden, Jesus prays, “Let this cup pass.” And then comes the recapitulation: “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours.”

The resonance is strong.

Annunciation and Agony are closer than we usually recognize.

God's Holy Child does not bypass humanity to save the world. Jesus inhabits it. And perhaps — if we dare to say it — he learned the grammar of that consent from Mary, whom we call The Mother of God.

From her he learned a fierce song of rebellion against broken human structures — against a world ready to discard an unwed mother — inspiring his courage to speak his assent to a divine will that would also cost him everything.

He learned to say no to what seems easy but ultimately binds us to death, and to say yes to what threatens the body yet restores the soul.

Teach us, too, Mary, as we pray to you today.

The Second Sorrowful Mystery: The Scourging at the Pillar

Lord Jesus, you are bound to the pillar — not because you lack power, but because unholy violence, sanctioned, believes it has won. This punishment meant to warn, to humiliate, to make an example.

You, the Beloved Son, stand exposed in a body that can bruise, split, and bleed.

In your flesh we see every body that has been criminalized before it was known. Every body beaten in the name of order. Every body made spectacle to reassure a fearful crowd. You are there in the falsely accused, in the over-sentenced, in the restrained and silenced. You are there in the child who learns too early that power hurts. You are there in communities over-policed and under-protected. You are there in prisons, in interrogation rooms, in homes where anger becomes a fist.

Show us again the stripes on your body — on your Black body, on your brown body, on your poor body, on every body the world has marked as expendable. Let us see clearly what we have tried not to see.

Reveal to us, with unbearable mercy, the places where we have needed the whip. Where we have punished to feel secure. Where we have shamed to avoid our own shame. Where we have preferred retribution to restoration because restoration requires surrender.

You do not strike back. You do not curse the hands that bind you. You absorb the lie that violence is strength and expose it as weakness.

Heal us, Lord, from the need to wound.Heal our systems that baptize brutality as safety.Heal our imaginations that sentence without trial.

By your wounded back, teach us another way: a way in which power protects, justice restores, and no body is disposable.

Finally, we pray you bless the hands that untie, the hands that bandage, and the hands that refuse to hold the whip. Turn our clenched fists into open palms, ready to receive anyone we once feared enough to harm.

The Third Sorrowful Mystery: The Crowning with Thorns

And the soldiers mocked him, saying: “Make way! Clear the narrow streets for the King!”

See him now: the prince who owns nothing! Hear them cry: “Make way for the Monarch of the Meaningless, the Sovereign of Slaves.”

Behold his regalia: His ermine is the white of exposed bone and the mottled bruising of his shoulders. His velvet is the deep crimson of blood drying in the midday sun. His diamonds the salt of evaporated sweat dried tears.

See his Crown: not of gold, soft and pliant, but the earth’s exposed pain —thorns that pierce Love Incarnate. It is a fitting diadem for the King of Nowhere, whose throne is a discarded stump and whose scepter is a hollow reed.

“Behold your king!” they shout, and these who scorn become prophets, for his refusal of kingship makes him the only One worth kneeling before.

They mock his borders, for he has none; for boundaries drawn in hatred break open in his presence, unable to withstand the intensity of his truth. They mock his guards: only a wailing mother and a few frightened friends. They mock his power, for he refuses to close his hand into a fist even as the thorns are driven deep into weeping skin.

Lord Jesus, we join the mockery when we demand a God who looks like Caesar.  We deride your ironic majesty every time insist on victory that gives to others your scars.

By your mocked dignity, restore our own.By your crown of thorns, wither our pride.By your silent majesty, teach us to reign by serving.

The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery: Carrying the Cross 

“...that we, walking in the Way of the Cross will find it none other than the way of Peace.”                  — Collect for Holy Week 

Tertullian, the second-century theologian, is often credited with the phrase: “I believe because it is absurd.” 

It is, as famous soundbites often are, not the whole story. Still, it stands. Christianity is manifestly not a rational system. It is not wrong to call it hyper-rational but it is not at all what we call “common sense.” 

Committing to finding ways to love our enemies is counter-productive to those who prefer to see the world in terms of winners and losers. 

Over and over, when someone demands Jesus take a side, he does. With “the losers.” 

You don’t like that? He seems to ask when he sides with the “wrong ones.” Well, I guess you don’t like me either, because I am that, too. 

Christianity as a fledgling movement received its earliest, harshest criticisms for being a welcome home to women and slaves. It is a seeming absurdity, this love so willing to identify with “untouchables” that it confirmed: Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.

In my formation, “carrying one’s cross” was often a euphemism for suffering quietly.

But Jesus does not ask for silence. 

He cried out on the cross —not for vengeance, but for mercy — with the last effort of his failing body. This is both the Way of the Cross and what former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry called The Way of Love: the revelation of God made manifest Jesus, who shows us how to transform the pain of the world into an opportunity for blessing to break in.

When Jesus says, Take up your cross and follow me, he is not asking us to suffer as he suffered. He is asking us not to abandon others as he was abandoned. He is not calling us to suffer, but to help alleviate suffering—even for those we think “deserve” it. 

Blessed Dorothy Day, baptized in this very church, reminds us:  

The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving...

Only those who accompany Jesus on the way of sorrows have any hope of a lasting peace. It is an absurd belief, but I cling to it.  Will we carry our cross with him along that old street in Jerusalem? It is barely wider than an alley. Truly, he said: “Narrow is the way.” 

The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery: The Crucifixion

This mystery is heavy. The crucifixion confirms: everything is lost. The absolute worst has happened.

The Crucifixion asks a lot of us because it presents more questions than it could ever answer. Maybe the biggest question — at least to me — is WHY?  

WHY WAS THIS ALLOWED? 

It was allowed because we allow it. We’re allowing it right now. It is easy to blame the crowd in the story. But we’re still the same crowd. And the exact same thing is happening again.

Right. Now.

And we’re allowing it. 

It starts small. We just turn away and pretend not to notice something we know is wrong. If we do that enough times, innocent people die. Meditating on the Crucifixion will not allow us our usual habit of looking away.  

 The mutilated body of Christ demands we gaze upon the end result of what we will allow. 

O all you who pass by, look and see                                

If there be any sorrow like my sorrow? 

It is ugly. It is bloody. It is barely human. 

What a sad, sad story.  

Jesus’s story. Our story. Our stories. One of the saddest stories that we tell ourselves is that it had to happen this way.  

No, it didn’t.  

It did happen, though, in all its horror and blood.

BUT. (And this turning is the entirety of Christian understanding, so understand this.) 

But somehow, God was still able to communicate through one of the absolute worst ways of killing humanity has invented a transformation of our worst into absolute inestimable beauty and the pinnacle of our own humanity.  

Because violence is one of the deepest languages we speak, it is the language into which God the Word allowed Godself to be translated. This revelation is to us exquisitely beautiful and horrifically ugly at the same time. 

Monstrare — the latin verb “to show”, and the source of our word “demonstrate” — contains a verbal breadcrumb of this unveiled terror.

A monstrance is the device used to contain the sacred host so that it can be shown (revealed) to the devoted. Hence also the word ‘monstra’, or monster. What is revealed is monstrous. (This is just verbal redundancy at one level, but it is sonar-depth theology at another.)  

What the Cross reveals is monstrous. Are we able to bear how much God is trying to show us of Godself? It seems we would rather turn away.  

No wonder then God’s cry of abandonment, which is ours, which we insist on, and which he bore, as we, in our unable-to-be-roused passivity insisted, even unto death. 

O all you who pass by, look and see:                                

If there be any sorrow like my sorrow?