Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus

Now, while Simon labours under the cross with Jesus, while Mary his mother follows behind him in the crowd, someone – a woman – forces her way through the rabble, even through the guard of Roman soldiers surrounding him, and comes face to face with Christ. She is driven by compassion.

The face that the Lord turns to her is terrible to look on; it is difficult to believe that it is the face of the Son of God. It is difficult even for those who have once seen his face shining with the brilliance of a fire of snow upon Tabor to believe in him now. Two of them have fled from him, just as those others have done though they have seen Him command the wind and the waves and raise the dead.

This is the opening of a meditation on the 6th of the Stations of the Cross, the encounter between Jesus and the woman pious convention names Veronica, by the remarkable 20th century English sculptress, artist, poet, therapist and mystic, Caryll Houselander.

She goes on:

She comes with a veil in her hands, a cloth on which to wipe the poor disfigured face. She kneels, as we kneel to wipe the tears from the faces of little children. Gratefully, the head bowing over her sinks into the clean linen cloth and for a brief moment is covered by it. Then he raises his head, and she, kneeling there, her own face lifted, sees the face of Christ looking down at her, and behind it, the great beam of the cross. The two are together, within the shadow of the cross on the street, Veronica and Christ.

But who is this woman, whose gesture is captured here with almost photographic sharpness of vision? At first it seems that we have to say honestly, we do not know. Her story, this tiny cameo of tenderness amidst the jostling barbarity of the Passion, the softness of her proffered towel contrasting with the dazzling glint of weaponry in the sun, the ringing of the soldiers’ steps on the paving of the via dolorosa; the imprinting, as reward for her quiet but determined compassion of the divine image on a scrap of linen, all of this has, in its understated way, captured the imagination of centuries. Veronica and her veil turn up in surprising company. This is sometimes touching: the tiny blue speedwell flower is botanically named veronica, as our Medieval forebears saw in the subtle white patterning on the petals an image of the holy face, and sometimes perhaps a little uncomfortable: among the fake relics peddled by Chaucer’s cynical Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales is a replica of the holy handkerchief, and the “veronica” is also the name given to a particular bit of the choreography of the Spanish bullring, with the flourishing of the matador’s cape seen as somehow an echo of the holy woman’s surely more unobtrusive encounter with blood and sweat, an encounter in which the bravado of violence is met with the desire to soothe and heal.

So there are echoes of Veronica everywhere, but she remains, nonetheless, anonymous. In this very fact, however, there is an immense, and immensely comforting lesson to be learnt. Precisely in her hiddenness, Veronica speaks to, and for, all of us

Her very name, of course, to the Christian imagination, bespeaks a universal promise. She is Veronica, the one who bears the true likeness, the vero icon. And the restoration of this true likeness, the likeness of the true God in all of us is the very reason why Christ came among us, and the very reason he undertakes his way of the Cross and his exodus through death. As perhaps the best-known and best-loved of all meditations on the Stations, those of St Alphonsus, remind us when we pause for the sixth time on the journey with Christ to Calvary:

My most beloved Jesus, Thy face was beautiful before, but in this journey it has lost all its beauty, and wounds and blood have disfigured it. Alas! my soul also was once beautiful, when it received Thy grace in Baptism; but I have disfigured it since by my sins. Thou alone, my Redeemer, canst restore it to its former beauty. Do this by Thy Passion, O Jesus.

The greatest theological minds of our tradition have shrunk, defeated, from the task of giving a definitive answer to the question how the Passion of Christ accomplishes this divine cleansing, and it is not intellectual laziness but true humility to admit that we are here at the brink of a mystery so deep that we cannot hope to plumb its depths.

Nevertheless Veronica can give us, I think, some hints, especially if we call to mind one persistent feature of her legend that seems to have been common knowledge to our ancestors, but is, I think, rather more rarely reflected upon today.

From at least the fourth century, there was pervasively a connection made between Veronica and another woman who pushed her way towards Jesus through the crowds, in the springtime of his ministry. It was held, that is to say, that Veronica was the woman healed by Jesus as he was on his way to raise the little daughter of Jairus from death, the woman whom pain and weariness and social isolation had driven to penury as she spent all she had on useless attempts to stem the seemingly everlasting bleeding that dominated and constricted her life.

There is a breathtakingly lovely parallelism in the two incidents, and, if the woman healed of the issue of blood really did become Veronica, she surely could not have been unaware of the symmetry. Then, on that day when the violence of her need drove her to it, she grasped at the cloth Jesus wore; now, on the first Good Friday, she offers him, with shattering gentleness, a cloth with which to comfort him in his distress. He had dried up the blood which drained from her, exhausting her and bringing her shame; she wipes the blood from his face, moved by compassion, surely, for his degradation as much as for his physical suffering.

That Veronica may have been one whom Jesus had touched in this way suggests beautifully the connection between compassion and gratitude; not that there is some dutiful calculation to be made between God’s gifts to us and the price we put on them, as though we owe just this much service to our fellow men and women in return for what God has done for us. But in the scene of Veronica shoving her way through to the front of the crowd surrounding Jesus en route to his execution, we see compassion energised by gratitude. We see her doing this thing because she can’t not do it, can’t not be for Jesus what he has been for her, standing beside him in his need as he came to be with her, savingly, in hers. And the sign of her salvation is that she can do this, that she can minister God’s compassion to God himself and thereby become most truly and clearly his image.

There are many Veronicas in our world today and you don’t have to go far to find them, but then, nor do you have to go far to find Jesus walking his way of the cross. A 19th century French spiritual writer speaks of the world as one gigantic set of Stations, with all the members of Christ’s mystical body the Church in via to calvary. This can be a double consolation for us. It means, first, that our own suffering is taken up into the suffering of Jesus, and thereby even when it seems to humiliate and defeat us, we can still be assured that we have the dignity of sons and daughters of God, cooperating with Jesus our brother for the salvation of the world he loves. But it means, too, that in comforting others in their distress, we are actually walking with Jesus himself on his way to Golgotha. There are many Veronicas, many ways of being Veronica. I think of the students in the Fisher House SVP conference who go nightly onto the streets of Cambridge, giving soup and sandwiches to the homeless, but also offering them the tender and sometimes costly touch of companionship. I think of an elderly man refusing to allow his own fear and grief to prevent him from ministering consolation to his wife of decades as she confronts the passion of dementia. Those experiences of confession in which the administration of the sacrament is akin to wiping the face of one labouring under the cross which I strongly suspect are occasions of gratitude as much for priest as for penitent.

So, who is Veronica? It seems, after all, that it is not strictly accurate, or at any rate not strictly the whole story, to say that we do not know. Here, finally, in words much better than mine, is Caryll Houselander again:

Saviour of the world,

Drive me by the strength

Of your tenderness

To come close to human pain.

Give my hands

That are hardened by pity,

That will dip into any water

And bathe any wound

In mercy.

Give me your hands,

Hands that heal the blind

By their touch

Hands that raise the dead

And are nailed to the cross;

Give me your hands

To tend the wounds of the body

and the wounds of the mind.

Give me your eyes

To discern the beauty of your face

Hidden under the world’s sorrow

Give me the grace to be a Veronica;

To wipe away

the ugliness of sin

from the human face,

And to see

your smile on the mouth of pain,

your majesty on the face of dereliction,

and in the bound and helpless,

the power of your infinite love.

Lord, take my heart

and give me yours.