We do not know where S. Mary was during these days, but we are sure that she was as near our Lord as it was possible for her to be.  We know that her own thought would be of the possibility of ministering to Him.  We know that she would not have fled with the Apostles in their momentary panic.  She was at the Cross, and she was at the grave, and she would have been as near Him in the agony and the trial as it was possible for her to be.  And she too was in agony.  Every pang of our Lord found echo in her.  Every blow that fell upon His bleeding back, she too felt.  Every insult that the soldiers inflicted, hurt her.  Our Lord in the consciousness of His mission is constantly sustained by the thought that His Passion and Death is an offering to the will of the Father,—­an offering even for these miserable men who are brutally treating a man whom they know to be innocent.  Her sorrow is the utter desolation of seeing the One Whom she loves above all else suffer, while she can bear Him no alleviation in His suffering, cannot so much as wipe the blood from off His wounded brow, cannot even touch His hand, and look her love into His eyes.  She follows from place to place while our Lord is being hustled from Caiaphas to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and back again; from time to time hearing from some one who has succeeded in getting nearer, how the trial is going on, what the accusation is, how Jesus is bearing Himself, what answers He has made, what the authorities have said.  Once and again, it may be, catching a distant glimpse of Him as He is led about by the guards, seeing Him always more worn and weary, always nearer the point of collapse.  Herself, too, nearer collapse; yet going on still with that strength that love gives to mothers, determined at the cost of any suffering to be near Him, as near as she can be, till the very end.  So we see her on that day in the streets of Jerusalem, and think of the distance travelled since the morning when Gabriel said to her, wondering:  “Hail thou that art highly favoured....  Blessed art thou among women.”

We, too, follow.  We have so often followed, with the Gospel in our hands, and wondered at the method of God.  We have tried hour after hour to penetrate the meaning of the Passion, to find what personal message it brings, to discover what light it throws on our own lives.  We have gone out into Gethsemane and placed ourselves with the three chosen Apostles while our Lord went on to pray by Himself; and we have discovered in ourselves the same weariness, the same tendency to sleep, in the presence of what we tell ourselves is the most important of all interests.  We call up the scene under the olives, and find that we wander and are inattentive and idle when we most want to be attentive and alert.  We place ourselves in the group that surrounds our Lord when the soldiers, led by Judas, come, and ask ourselves shall I too run away?  And our memory flashes the answer:  You have run away again and again:  you have in the face, not of grave dangers, but of insignificant trifles—­how insignificant they look now—­for fear of criticism, for fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away.  The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect.