Walking with Jesus to the Cross As Mary Did – Lent 2026

Summary

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In Mary’s steadfast presence at the Cross, we discover what it means to remain with Jesus. This reflection considers her faithfulness in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection and how we can follow her example.

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“Standing by the cross, Mary shares in the gift which the Son makes of himself: she offers Jesus, gives him over, and begets him to the end for our sake. The ‘yes’ spoken on the day of the Annunciation reaches full maturity on the day of the cross…”

Evangelium Vitae, 103

1. What is the Lord asking of you right now? How can you submit to His will in this area?

2. What are some ways you can build up a life of prayer and intimacy  with the Lord, particularly during this Lenten season? Where can you make space for silence and solitude in your daily life?

3. How do you see the Holy Spirit working in your life? How can you invite Him into your life every day?

4. When suffering enters my life, do I remain with Jesus—or do I try to escape, numb, or rush past it? What does it look like for me, concretely, to follow Mary’s example and to “stand at the foot of the Cross” today?

Text: Walking with Jesus to the Cross As Mary Did

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Hi, I am Pete Burak. Let’s pray.

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Mary’s Faithfulness

As we journey through Lent, it’s important to recognize the various characters that are involved in Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection, and to analyze each of them and see what can we learn from them, how can we be inspired by them, and what role do they play in this incredible mission that Jesus has, right? Jesus comes, He’s born in Bethlehem, but the culmination of His mission is coming up in Holy Week, the Last Supper, Good Friday, death and resurrection, all of these things, the Triduum itself, is like this culmination that, ultimately, even culminates with the pouring out of His Spirit on Pentecost.

But this journey, this mission that Jesus is on involves many other characters, many other people who are responding to what the Lord is doing, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, but they’re walking with Jesus through these experiences. And as we look at all the various people that are involved, I think, fundamentally, we should first acknowledge our blessed mother, Mary.

And so today, in today’s talk, we’re going to talk about Mary’s faithfulness in walking with Jesus to the cross and what we can learn and maybe how we can be inspired by her faithfulness, and then how we can do the same because Mary is the first disciple. She is the one who most perfectly unites her will to the will of God. She’s the one who most faithfully, consistently acknowledges who her son is, what He has come to do and understands and utilizes her role in His mission. Mary’s faithfulness is without compare.

And what is faithfulness? Is to be committed both in faith and in action to the plan of God and to the relationship that she has with Jesus. She is connected to her son, and her faithfulness means that throughout the entire journey that we are on in Lent, but through the entire journey of Jesus’s earthly ministry, Mary is a consistent, obedient, loving, fruitful presence throughout all of it.

She walks with her son. And in each of these moments, she pops up in the frame, sometimes silently, we don’t hear her speak, but we see her presence, we see her reaction, and we can learn something and be inspired by where she is, how she is, and what she does. And so if you think about, even just as we journey towards the Triduum, she’s there at the foot of the cross, she’s there, well, even before that, she’s there on the way to the cross, she’s there at the foot of the cross, she’s invited into the resurrection right from the start, she’s there at Pentecost.

She’s just this consistent motherly faithful presence with Jesus, and, by extension, the people that are around Him. She is the mother of us all. She’s the mother of the Church. And so looking at her, I think that I want to identify three areas or three descriptions we can make of her that help us understand what it looks like to be faithful to Jesus all the way to the cross and beyond.

Mary’s Persistent Obedience

So the first thing I want to highlight in Mary is what I like to call Mary’s persistent obedience. Mary’s persistent obedience. Right from the beginning, when we meet her, we are struck by her fiat, right? The angel appears to her, Angel Gabriel, reveals to her who she is and what she’s made for and what she will do. And Mary is faced with this incredible decision, “Will I obey and submit to God’s will for my life, and, by extension, all of creation? Or will I rebel? Will I resist? Will I say no?”

And just like our first parents in the garden of Eden, she’s given that free will opportunity to submit and obey or to resist and disobey. And right from the beginning, we see Mary with those incredible words, “Be it done unto me according to thy word.” What she participates in right from the beginning is one of the love languages of heaven, which is obedience. She doesn’t say much in the scriptures, Mary, but two of the things she says, “Be it done unto me according to thy word, I will obey,” and, “Do whatever He tells you,” in encouragement to obey.

She models obedience for us and then encourages us to do the same. And every step along her life is this constant persistent obedience to God’s will, even when it’s hard, even when it’s confusing, even when it’s painful. So certainly the incarnation, then her, you know, going to visit Elizabeth, then walking with Joseph all the way to Bethlehem, then the birth in a stable, and how confusing that must have been, and then the flight to Egypt. We have to obey the angel. We have to get out of here. Now the back to Nazareth and all, and then we lose Him in the temple. Every step along the way, Mary consistently is obeying God’s will.

More than any other person in the history of the world, outside of Jesus, more than any other person, she lived a life of persistent, and I’ll just add for fun, radical obedience. She recognized that the second thing I’m going to talk about was only possible through obedience. She did not see obedience as shackles to enslave her, but she saw obedience as the pathway to freedom, joy, and fulfillment.

In today’s world, so often, obedience is seen almost like a dirty word. It’s like, “Why would you ever submit? Why would you ever obey?” The whole modern project is throw off the shackles, throw off the constraints of ideologies and the patriarchy and established religions, and anything that would hold you down, keep you, put any guardrails on your life, we are encouraged now to rebel against, to cast off. And what we see in Mary is that her faithfulness to her son is tied directly to her obedience to God’s will. She just wants to walk every step along the way with Jesus. She wants to follow Jesus. She wants to obey Jesus. She, again, is such a model of discipleship.

What does it, what are two questions that every disciple should be constantly asking themselves? “What’s God saying to me,” and, “What am I doing about it?” What’s God saying to me, what’s His will, what is His opinion, what is He communicating to me? And then what am I doing about it? Am I submitting to it, am I obeying it? Or am I rejecting it? You look at Mary, she’s constantly wondering, “What does God want me to do?” And then based on what she’s hearing from the Lord, she’s acting on it. She’s living in harmony, in communion with God’s will. Her actions, her mind, her very behavior is connected to what Jesus wants for her in each and every moment.

Consistent Intimacy

So the first characteristic, or the first way to describe, or maybe the first source of encouragement for how we can be faithful to the Lord, to Jesus, is through persistent obedience. Now, persistent obedience allows for, in a deeper and more concrete way, what I would call consistent intimacy. So we have persistent obedience and consistent intimacy. What does Jesus say in John 14? He says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” To be friends with Jesus is to be obedient to His will. And then in John 15, He talks about, when we do the will of God, just as He is doing the will of the Father, we abide with Him, we make a home in Him, He comes and dwells in us. And he says, “That my joy may be in you, and your joy may be full,” that this road of obedience leads to a deeper and deeper intimacy with God. And in that intimacy, we are fully activated as His beloved sons and daughters.  

That through free will, we have an opportunity to reject the Lord. But as we reject Him, it doesn’t mean He loves us any less. But our experience of that love, our intimacy is absolutely affected by our decisions. Sin ruptures our relationship with God. Sin does damage to the connection, to the intimacy that we have with God. And so as we strive for persistent obedience, then, as we see with Mary, is we have the opportunity for consistent intimacy. And in Mary, we know for sure that her faithfulness to her son was tied to her unusual, completely unique love for Him and her experience of His love for her, that God comes in the form of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes and makes her a temple of the Holy Spirit, so much so that Jesus is incarnated in her. And none of us will ever experience that level of intimacy on this side of heaven.

But Mary is a foretaste. That intimacy of carrying Jesus in her womb is a foretaste of the complete and total union we will experience with God in heaven. And so, we cannot look at her faithfulness and detach it from her deep abiding, consistent intimacy with God. And we get little glimpses of it. You know, she’s just, and this is just more on a physical level, she just seems to always want to be around Jesus. She just, as much as she’s able to, and, you know, there’s different parts of the gospels where it’s a little bit like, well, where is she at this time or place, but I think most profoundly, we see her deep intimacy and the deep love that she has that even in the moment of greatest threat, in the moment of greatest danger, in the moment of greatest hardship and suffering, where do we find Mary? We find her on the way of the cross and at the foot of the cross. Intimacy. And who’s there with her? John. And how is John described? As the beloved apostle, the beloved disciple.

The love was deep for both of them, deeper for Mary, but still deep for John. And it was such profound love and so deep and so intimate that it actually gave them the courage and the willingness to risk suffering, to risk their own death, to risk their own pain and discomfort to be with Jesus in His moment of greatest suffering Himself. And so Mary’s consistent life of persistent obedience gave her the, fashioned the virtue in her to continue to obey the Lord no matter what the cost, no matter what the circumstance, which then also tied into, it’s two sides of the coin, she is filled with deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper love for God the Father in this Holy Spirit through the Son.

And so she’s just walking with her son, she’s walking in union with God in this consistent intimacy, has this very visible expression in the fact that she meets Him on the way of His suffering and is standing there at the foot of His cross, suffering with Him. That’s the type of intense love that the Lord is calling us to, that’s the level of intimacy that we have, is available to us through persistent obedience and constant, consistent love of the Lord.

A Woman of Prayer

Now, where does that love get fostered, though, isn’t necessarily in the public expressions of where we see Mary, but in that little hint, what’s it talk about, that Mary would ponder these things in her heart. That’s intimacy. There’s the public expression of what intimacy allows for, her standing at the foot of the cross, but then there’s the habit or the pattern of life that fuels that action, which is the pondering of these things in her heart.

Another way to put that is she was a woman, she is a woman of prayer. She’s communicating to the Lord constantly. She’s aware of the Lord’s presence in her, and she’s drawing attention to what He’s doing in her heart. She’s drawing attention to the things that He’s saying to her. She’s drawing attention to the ways that His grace is moving in her and helping her grow, helping her be formed, helping her be strengthened, helping her grow in understanding and wisdom and knowledge and fortitude and all the things that she needs in order to accomplish what the Lord has put before her.

So consistent intimacy for us means not just public expressions of love of the Lord, but a clear, concrete, ongoing life with the Lord in the quiet, in the silence, and in the solitude. Persistent obedience, second, consistent intimacy, and then third thing I want to point out about her ability to be faithful to her son on the way to the cross, is she is radically full of the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit and Mary

Mary is, the Holy Spirit comes upon her in such power. As I said a minute ago, the Holy Spirit comes upon her in such power that, literally, God becomes man in her womb. She is completely given over to the Holy Spirit. She is the spouse of the Spirit. She loves the Holy Spirit, and she operates in the Holy Spirit. And it’s all three of these things woven together that demonstrate and gives her the strength to walk all the way to the cross and beyond.

She’s persistently obedient because she’s hearing the voice of God, how? Through the power of the Holy Spirit. How does the Lord speak to us? Through His Holy Spirit. You want to know what God’s saying to you and what He wants you to do about it? Ask the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s the one who, that still small voice is the Spirit that speaks into our hearts and to our minds, through other people, through the scriptures, in all sorts of different ways in order for us to know what His will is so we can act on it. What does intimacy with God look like? We are holy because He is holy, and He who is holy comes and makes a home in us.

We believe that as baptized Catholics, we have become temples of the Holy Spirit, that the full power of God lives in us, that the Holy Spirit is not just this dove that hangs out on the side, He’s not just this pillar of fire that seems a little scary, no, He comes and makes a home in us. He transforms us, as scripture tells us, from one degree of glory to the next. That every step along the way, when we need more strength, the Holy Spirit gives us to it. When we need to be purified, the Holy Spirit purifies us.

I mean, think about it, the Holy Spirit is described as fire, as I said. What does fire do? Well, fire does lots things. One of the things fire does is it transforms things. So if you take fire and apply it to wood, it becomes ash. So we are different when the Holy Spirit comes upon us. We were once sons and daughters of wrath. And now we are sons and daughters of God through the power of the Holy Spirit, through our baptism. The Holy Spirit or fire propels things. So if you build a big enough fire and you channel it, you can go to the moon. It’s called propulsion, right? Big fire, channeling, bang, blast off. The Holy Spirit moves us. The Holy Spirit moves in our hearts to initiate action, to get us going down the path that the Lord has for us.

What else do fire do? It illuminates. Fire, you know, you bring fire into a dark room and you can see clearly. One of the things we see in Mary is she could see with the eyes of God. The Holy Spirit is alive in her, and she can see what is happening before her, even as it’s difficult, even as it’s hard, even as her pierce, her heart is pierced, as it was prophesied, she’s able to see what her son is doing and continue to submit to it.

And then finally, fire purifies, and fire makes us, you know, you put garbage in the fire to destroy it. You put gold in a fire to make it more pure, to make it more what it really is. And as Sirach talks about, one of the things that happens with us is we find ourselves in these furnaces of humiliation, in Sirach 2. And what happens in a furnace of humiliation, through suffering, through this time of intensity, we become more the person that the Lord has made us to be. And in Mary’s case, she who is, you know, rescued from original sin, who does not sin, the need for her purification is different than us. But the point is, she’s modeling for us what it looks like to sit in the fire.

And even though she wasn’t necessarily being purified by the fire of Jesus’s cross, she’s showing us what it looks like to sit in the cross so as to be more and more united to the Lord’s will in order to accomplish His mission.

I’ve heard it said that, you know, you put gold in a fire to wash away its, you know, iniquities and take away all its impurities. That’s a better word for it. You put silver in a fire, and you know that silver has become pure when you can see your reflection in it, when you can see your reflection in it. So very often, the Lord allows us to be in times of fire so that we can be purified, so that He can see Himself in us, that we look like Him. And this is what we see in Mary. Mary, perfectly given over to the will of God, perfectly connected to His love and perfectly filled with the power of the Holy Spirit moves throughout her earthly ministry, and then throughout the history of the Church as a extension of Christ’s love, as an extension of His salvific work, as a pathway, as a model, as a cheerleader, as a mother to bring us to her son.

A Source of Inspiration For Us

And so every step along the way, Mary’s faithfulness to the cross is supposed to be a source of inspiration for us. And so, very quickly, if you’re thinking this, “Okay, Pete, what do I actually do about it?” Well, just three quick tips that correspond with these three things. The first for persistent obedience is to actually ask yourself, “God, what are you saying to me? And what do you want me to do about it?” Like, actually ask those two questions.

And I can’t tell you how many people over the years have said, “Well, I never hear God talk to me.” Well, my number one question when people say, “I never hear God talk to me,” is, well, have you read your scripture recently? Because if you haven’t read your scripture, then you’re not really listening to the Lord. So open up the word of God and let Him speak to you through these words. Because the Spirit is alive in these words. These scriptures are living and active, they’re sharper than any two-edged sword. This is pertinent, relevant, anointed words to help us navigate life and understand who we are, what we’re made for, and where we’re going. So ask those two questions for persistent obedience.

Second, for consistent intimacy, it’s nearly impossible to be consistently intimate with the Lord if there’s too much noise in your life. And there are a lot of noises in the world. And I get it, you’re literally watching a video right now that’s speaking at, talking to you and filling the space. And that’s good. I’m not suggesting that you cut out all other voices, but to be able to carve out time every single day when you are alone with the Lord, when the real you encounters the real Him, that you can just stand there before Jesus just saying, “Jesus, my best attention, my only attention is on You.”

And it can be hard. Listen, I’m a father of five. The idea of solitude and silence almost is like, like, I’m not even sure that exists, but yet I found it. And right now, the most consistent place that I can be alone with the Lord is in my car. I drop the kids off at school and I drive to work, it’s about 15 minutes, and I can just sit and be with Jesus. Yes, my eyes are on the road and I’m paying attention so as to not have a crash, but I’m focused on the Lord. Carving out time where you’re just looking at Him.

Eucharistic adoration is a tremendous opportunity to just sit and waste time with Jesus. You waste time with your friends. You waste time all the time, “waste time,” you know? You just are around your friends. Well, you need to be just around with Jesus and allow that solitude and silence to be a place of encounter with Jesus again. So read your scripture, answer those two questions, find time for solitude and silence, and then finally, to be filled with more of the power of the Holy Spirit is to just give the Holy Spirit permission to move in your life, to not cage the Holy Spirit.

Come Holy Spirit

And so a simple prayer, come, Holy Spirit, and, Holy Spirit, I give You permission. Come, Holy Spirit, just fill me with more of Your power. Release in me a greater expression of Your love. And, Holy Spirit, I give You permission to move in my mind, to move in my heart, to move in my body. I give You permission to guide me, to purify me, to send me, to open my eyes to what You’re doing, to empower me to do Your will, to fill me, to make me holy, but also to make me fruitful.

So say that prayer, come, Holy Spirit, and, Holy Spirit, I give You permission. And if we do these things, if we’re persistently obedient, we’re consistently intimate with the Lord and we’re wide open and full of the Holy Spirit, like Mary, we will be able to be faithful in walking with Jesus down the path that He has set before us. Even when it’s hard, even when we fall, we can get back up, and through being crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, we can be crucified with Him so that as we die with Him, we might also rise with Him just like our mother. God bless you.

About Pete Burak

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