In the past three months, sicne Christmas began, we have seen Jesus held close to Mary: as she brings him into the world, after fleeing from the wrath of an insane tyrant and as she enters the Temple in Jerusalem.  He has also been held close by those she has offered him to shepherds coming down from the wild hills of Bethlehem, Magi who travelled such a distance to see him, Simeon and Anna, who have waited their whole lives for this moment.

Just before he begins his final journey, he is held by another, who caresses his feet and wipes tears away with her hair as she anoints him in preparation for his death. But it is this holding after death by the woman who tended to his every physical need when he was a child that captured the imagination of Michaelangelo and of all those who have seen it since.

The statue, the ‘Pieta’ stands at the door of St Peter’s in Rome. It is hard to see any emotion in Mary’s face and so we are left to gauge her feelings from the way in which mother and son are created out of one block of marble.  The way his body is hewn out of the folds of her clothes. The angle of her head as she watches over him. The way his hand still seems to hold her skirt, even in death. The only part of the marble which breaks this intimate union between mother and son is her hand, held out in the same way a priest holds out their hands in prayer, at the altar. This is the hand that invites us into the picture, to be part of it, to stand before her grief and reflect.

And the reflection is almost too much to bear. Because this broken body, this very human form is the immediate result of our petty jealousies and fears, of political thinking extrapolated to the wrong conclusion, of hopes infected with last-minute realism and the capitulation of peer pressure. The Passion narratives we rehearse during Holy Week are a painful indictment of the worst kind of human nature and, 21 centuries on, we know our part in His death is as real now as it ever was. The Pieta is not the Cross: familiar symbol of atonement and comfort to those who bring their suffering to ‘the foot of the cross’.

It is the next installment of the story. An imagined moment in which Mary gathers up the horror of her crucified child as the thunder clouds gather and the earth is covered in darkness. It is this unfamiliarity that forces us to think about the story from a different persepctive and, in doing so, sheds new light on the meaning of these 40 days of penitence. This is the human cost of our sin. This broken body is God. What have we done?
The Revd Tessa Kuin Lawton is chaplain of Magdalen College School, Oxford and Curate in Training at Bampton with Clanfield.