Visio Divina
Ask for the grace to see and receive from the Holy. Sit silently and contemplate the image for a few minutes.
What word or phrase comes to mind? What emotion arises?
Note the figures, faces, hands, feet, the details of musculature, veins, clothing. Is your eye drawn to something in the image? Stay with that observation. Or imagine yourself observing the scene.
Continue to sit quietly with this sculpture.
What feelings do you have as you consider the sorrow of Jesus’s beloved mom and friends? Mary holds her son, raises her hand. Mary Magdalene presses her face against Jesus’s hand, cradles his foot with her hand. Nicodemus literally felt the weight, the smell, the blood, the wetness of the body as he removed Jesus from the cross. Can you imagine the physical sensation of handling his lifeless body?
Share with God your response to this horrific scene. What grace do you need?
Carry this image in your mind through the day.
Ask and allow the Spirit to remind you of Jesus’s suffering and death as you tarry before Resurrection day arrives. The death of death lies just ahead. What is God inviting you into during the wait for Easter?
- A Pietà (meaning “pity” or “compassion”) is a common convention in Christian art, usually sculpture, which depicts the moments after the Deposition (removal of Jesus from the cross) when the lifeless body of Mary’s son is placed in her arms. Her grief unrestrained, her mourning poured out, we feel compassion toward her. Sometimes the scene includes other figures besides Mary and Jesus.
- This version of the Pietà by Orvieto, Italy, native Ippolito Scalza (1532–1617) was created in 1579 and housed in the Orvieto Cathedral (Duomo). Scalza carved the work from a single block of marble with the possible exception of the left arm of Nicodemus and the upper part of the ladder. Its characters include Jesus Christ; Mary, his mother, holding his corpse with hand raised in resignation; and Mary Magdalene—with downcast expression, cradling Christ’s foot and left hand,—and Nicodemus, holding the hammer, rope, and ladder used to remove Jesus from the cross. This sculpture invites us to consider the physical and emotional aspect of removing the body of Jesus from the cross. And the unbearable sorrow of the friends who loved him dearly, who witnessed his suffering and death.
- Key to Umbria website, background on sculptor Scalza and cathedral in Orvieto.