From The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by J-J Tissot (1897)
Mary receives the Body of her Son. J-J Tissot |
The round stone seen from within. J-J Tissot |
The Apostles and disciples, who have been looking on from afar ready to flee, then venture to approach now that their enemies have left Calvary. The Holy Women are also present, doing their best to aid the Mother of the Saviour. The crown of thorns when removed is put carefully aside. That precious relic will at first by reverently preserved by the family of Jesus, then it will pass into the hands of the first Christian Bishops and later into the care of the Emperors of Constantinople, until at last it will be taken charge of by Saint Louis, to be preserved in Paris until the present day, a silent witness of the troubles and the triumphs of the Church of Christ.
Saint Anselm, in his Cur Deus Homo, claims that it was revealed to him by the Virgin herself that Joseph of Arimathæa, when he went to Pilate to ask for the body of Jesus, urged as one of the reasons why it should be given to him the fact of the Mother of the Victim being at the point of death from grief. If Jesus, condemned as He had been by the usual legal authority, might be supposed to have been guilty, there was at least no doubt that His mother was innocent and deserved the compassion of the procurator. Would it be just to deprive her in her deep affection of the melancholy joy of burying her Son? Must she, innocent as she was, be completely crushed by an act of harshness so unprecedented?
Totus tuus ego sum
Et omnia mea tua sunt;
Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam
Ad Jesum per Mariam
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