The Great Commandment and the Co-redemptrix

by Fr Serafino M. Lanzetta

We repost this article, published already here, in preparation of the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows (15 Semptember), with a little brush up.

In the gospel of St Matthew (22:34–46), Our Lord teaches us the great commandment of love, by reiterating what was already inscribed in Moses’ Law: to Love God first and above all other things (cf. Dt 19:18) and to love one’s neighbour as oneself (cf. Lv 19:18). It is one commandment with a twofold direction: vertical towards God and horizontal towards the neighbour. The vertical axis is foundational so that the horizontal one find its proper support. This is the Cross, made by two axes. In our neighbour we find God and for the sake of God’s love we love our neighbour. To love a person for the sake of the person, by disregarding God, as we get more and more used in a secularised society, is not to obey the divine commandment, but rather to stick to the manifesto of Freemasonry, mere humanitarianism, where religion is discarded and subordinate to man’s desire of greater knowledge and illumination, of happiness and peace; religion in function of man and not the other way around.

However, the question posed to Jesus by one of the Pharisees was to tempt Him. In what sense? The issue at stake was Christ. It was to put Him to the test and see what kind of answer he would give that the question about the great commandment was asked. They tried to catch him out and to deny his pretence to be God as the same Giver of the Law. The second part of St Matthew’s pericope (as above), in fact, deals with Jesus’ affirmation of his divinity, foreshadowed by Ps 109:1: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit thou at my right hand.” Jesus cannot be the Son of David because David himself addresses him as “my Lord”. He is rather the Son of the Father, already attested by the Psalm, as Our Lord says by leaving the Pharisees without any more questions; nor was anyone able to answer Him a word (cf. Mt 22:46).  

Christ was the centre of the great commandment. St John, by showing the intimate intersection of the two arrows of the commandment of love, will teach in his First Letter that one cannot love God, Who is unseen, if he does not love his neighbour, who can be seen (cf. 1Jn 4:20). Christ is the visible God, our Mediator, who unites God with man and vice versa. Therefore, only if we love Christ can we love our neighbour in truth, because in Him we see the “visible God”, our Saviour. Christian love without Christ, or beyond Him, is not only heretical but blasphemous — an empty humanitarian love. It is not true that all religions are ways to go to God: this is syncretism and false love — the denial of the uniqueness of Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life (cf. Jn 14:6). Love, instead, is Christological and salvific. Love in Christ, though difficult (think of forgiving one’s enemy, for instance), is always redemptive.

If we now connect this doctrine to the Marian feast of Our Lady of Sorrows (15 September), we can reflect in-depth on Our Lady’s involvement in our own salvation. By contemplating our Blessed Mother at the foot of the Cross, one can find in her the true and perfect icon of this great commandment. She loved God and neighbour perfectly. Loving Christ with her whole maternal heart, she loved her neighbour — each one of us — in Him. In Christ, her love became fully Christological and therefore salvific. She loved Christ in us and, for the sake of His eternal Love, she cooperated uniquely in our salvation. Her love was compassionate (from cum-patior — “to suffer with”). Her love was co-redeeming: it was perfect divine charity. As said previously, love is made by two axes, two arrows. Love is the Cross; hence, it is redeeming. True love is compassionate and sorrowful, for the fact that love is God and He is our Saviour. Love entails patience, suffering (cf. 1 Cor 13:4–7). The love of true Christian fellowship, as we know from Our Lord’s teaching, is to bear the Cross (cf. Lk 9:23). 

Our Lady did so magnificently. Her love was perfect and so was her sorrowful compassion. In this redeeming and co-redeeming love, there is the perfect union of Jesus and Mary. Mary in Jesus and Jesus in Mary. As the great Oratorian Father, Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) puts it, “in the case of the dolours, the union of the Mother and the Son is greater than any other mystery. He is Himself her one dolour seven times repeated, seven times changed, seven times magnified.”

Our Lady’s perfect charity is “love at work”: her perfect love for God, Jesus Her Son, and Her compassion towards us. In her compassion, derived from her co-redemption and well displayed by the Marian feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, there is the indissoluble conjunction of love for God and for the neighbour. One with Jesus — love, in fact, makes those who love each other as one — she contributed with her sorrowful love to regenerate us to eternal life. Her compassionate love was sacrificial. Our Lady’s Compassion is described by Fr Faber as the sacrifice of Mary beneath the Cross, just as the Passion is the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. In a very profound manner, the Oratorian Father goes on:

“There is a sacrificial and expiatory character in Mary’s Compassion which is peculiar to itself. The world was redeemed by the Passion of our Lord. But there never was, in the ordinance of God, such a thing as a Passion of Jesus disjoined from the Compassion of Mary. The two things were one simultaneous oblation, interwoven each moment through the thickly-crowded mysteries of that dread time, unto the Eternal Father, out of two sinless Hearts, that were the Hearts of Son and Mother, for the sins of a guilty world which fell on them contrary to their merits, but according to their own free will. Never was any sanctified sorrow of creatures so confused and commingled with the world-redeeming sorrow of Jesus as was the Compassion of His Mother.”

We can learn with Mary at the foot of the Cross how to love in truth, how to love as true Christians. In a time when love is regarded as above or beyond the truth, our great commandment risks to be seen as the accomplishment of relativism. If peace is more important than the one true religion, i.e., more important than God, it means that love is above (and against) the truth and God is subordinate to man. 

Our Lady gives us back the true commandment of love, whose fulfilment is the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. She was there as unique testimony of that love. With Our Lady Co-redemptrix, we are not ashamed to profess ourselves as followers of the Crucified Lord who loved us to the end (cf. Jn 13:1).