4th Station of the Cross - Jesus meets His Holy Mother

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Sir_Knight

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Where is this passage in the bible? I’m helping my daughter with her homework and can’t find this passage anywhere.

Thanks in advance 😉
 
Sir_Knight said:
Where is this passage in the bible? I’m helping my daughter with her homework and can’t find this passage anywhere.

Thanks in advance 😉
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I do not see that in the Scriptures, although I still see that scene of Jesus meeting his mother as an excellent point to meditate on.

Neither will you find Jesus’ falling for the first, second and third times.
 
Although we know that Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa ( Sorrowful Way ) most of the Stations of the Cross are not specifically referred to in the bible. This Devotion is thought to have evolved in the Middle Ages to help to remember and to teach others important parts of the scripture. Remember that many people could not read , this was a way of teaching them the faith and important parts of Jesus’ life and death. In Luke 23:26-31 he refers to the women of Jerusalem , but does not specifically refer to Mary. This does not necessarly mean she was not there , but neither does it indicate that she was. In the Gospel of John, Mary is found at the foot of the cross … one might think that she followed her son to Golgotha. Much of the Stations of the Cross came from devout people and their traditions. Catholics see tradition/Tradition and scripture as companions for the journey, not all Christians feel the same way.
 
Sir_Knight said:
Where is this passage in the bible? I’m helping my daughter with her homework and can’t find this passage anywhere.

Thanks in advance 😉
Click to expand...
It’s not in the Bible, first of all. What we only hear about in the gospel accounts of the Passion are:
  • Jesus being ‘led away’ to be crucified (Matthew 27:31b; Mark 15:20b;
  • Jesus carrying His cross up to the place of His execution (John 19:17)
  • Simon of Cyrene being drafted into service (Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26)
  • Jesus meeting a group of women mourning for Him (Luke 23:27-30)
  • Jesus being offered wine to drink with gall/myrrh (Matthew 27:34; Mark 15:23)
  • Jesus actually crucified (Luke 23:33)
  • Jesus’ clothes being divided by lot (Matthew 27:35; Mark 15:24; Luke 23:34; John 19:23-24)
I’ve only included the incidents from Jesus trodding the way, crossbeam in tow up to the point where He was nailed to the cross. The above would correspond to the 2nd, 5th, 8th, 10th, and 11th stations.

The station commemorating Jesus meeting Mary is probably inferred from St. John where she, “the disciple whom He loved” and other women are described as standing near Jesus’ cross at a point where He was still apparently alive (19:25-27) and the Synoptics which state that there were women “and all those who knew Him” - according to St. Luke - looking on “from a distance” at Jesus’ death (Matthew 27:55-56; Mark 15:40-41; Luke 23:49).

Just as an extra: let’s also tackle the other ‘non-Biblical’ (in one sense) Stations:

The three stations where Jesus falls is actually a remnant of a medieval belief which has Jesus falling seven times on the way, some of which are believed to have coincided with some events which happen to be also commemorated in our Stations (actually, the devotion to the Seven Falls of Christ is actually one of the precursors to the Via Crucis). It does not require a great leap to infer from the Gospels that Jesus may have been too weak to carry His cross (and thus stumbled and fell!), because we hear about Simon of Cyrene. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The three falls of Christ (third, seventh, and ninth Stations) are apparently all that remain of the Seven Falls, as depicted by [Adam] Krafft at Nuremburg and his imitators, in all of which Christ was represented as either falling or actually fallen. In explanations of this it is supposed that the other four falls coincided with His meetings with His Mother, Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, and the women of Jerusalem, and that in these four the mention of the fall has dropped out whilst it survives in the other three which have nothing else to distinguish them. A few medieval writers take the meeting with Simon and the women of Jerusalem to have been simultaneous, but the majority represent them as separate events. The Veronica incident does not occur in many of the earlier accounts, whilst almost all of those that do mention it place it as having happened just before reaching Mount Calvary, instead of earlier in the journey as in our present arrangement.

Veronica is a more tricky matter. The first mentions we have of her occur in the apocryphal Gospel known as the Acts of Pilate (first written and revised many times between 150-400 AD), where, at least in the Second Greek and Latin version of it, she is identified with the hemorrhaging woman who touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment. There, she defends Him at His trial before Pilate, shouting her story out.

Later, The Avenging of the Savior (7th-8th century AD) and The Death of Pilate continue the association of Veronica with the hemorrhaging woman and are also one of the first explicit mentions of an image of Jesus in a cloth which has some relation to her. In The Death of Pilate she receives the image somewhere during Jesus’ ministry (somewhat similar to the story of King Abgar): she once wished to have a painting of Jesus and expressed it to Him, and Jesus then obliged her by pressing His face onto a cloth (apparently the material on which the picture is supposed to be painted) which then miraculously bore His likeness. The Avenging of the Savior, meanwhile infers that the “portait of the Lord” was on clean linen which she kept in her house. One 12th century German poem even identified the painter as St. Luke: he tried to paint Jesus three times but failed miserably, at which point Jesus washes His face and dries it on a towel, leaving behind an image.

However, by the Middle Ages, during William Caxton’s (who translated Jacobus Voragine’s Golden Legend) time, the incident in which this event happens was apparently transferred: the imprinting of the cloth now occurs during the Passion, as Jesus makes his way to Calvary, and the ‘cloth’, instead of being a sort of canvas, is now Veronica’s veil which she uses to clean Jesus’ bloodied face. Even so, the original Latin Golden Legend interestingly contains the older version of the story: where Veronica had a piece of linen where she intended Jesus’ portrait to be painted on until He came in person and provided her with a much better one by personally wiping His face with it.
 
If it isn’t found in scripture, it make it a near impossible homework assignment to provide biblical verses for it :eek: try explaining that to a 5th grader. :rolleyes:
 
This raises a question about the person who GAVE the assignment - is the teacher not aware than not all the Stations are mentioned in Scripture?

Though I really like using the Proverbs citation for the falls (it is almost certainly the source of the tradition of 7 falls).
 
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