The reham of God

The Hebrew text of the Old Testament does not draw on psychology to speak about God's compassionate suffering with man. Rather, in accordance with the concreteness of Semitic thought, it designates it with a word whose basic meaning refers to a bodily organ, namely, rahamin. Taken in the singular, rahamin means the mother's womb. Just as "heart" stands for feeling, and "loins" and "kidneys" stand for desire and pain, the womb becomes the term for being with another; it becomes the deepest reference to man's capacity to stand for another, to take the other into himself, to suffer him, and in this long-suffering to give him life. The Old Testament, with a word taken from the language of the body, tells us how God shelters us in himself, how he bears us in himself with compassionate love.

The languages into which the Gospel entered when it came to the pagan world did not have such modes of expression. But the image of the Pietà, the Mother grieving for her Son, became the vivid translation of this word: in her, God's maternal affliction is open to view. In her we can behold it and touch it. She is the compassio of God, displayed in a human being who has let herself be drawn wholly into God's mystery. It is because human life is at all times suffering that the image of the suffering Mother, the image of the rahamin of God, is of such importance for Christianity. The Pietà completes the picture of the Cross, because Mary is the accepted Cross, the Cross communicating itself in love, the Cross that now allows us to experience in her compassion; the compassion of God.

Joseph Ratzinger