Easter Sunday is fast approaching, and now we are in the week of Passover. As a part of remembering this week, my husband and I have been reading the different accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection in each of the four Gospels. It is easy to become bored when reading a story you have read a hundred times before, but each time I read even the same story in the Bible, I find something new, and this is what makes the Bible come alive to me!
As we get older and enter into new stages of our life, we begin to see things from a different perspective. As a child we see the mother-child relationship from the child’s perspective, looking up to her mother. When we grow older and have our own children, there is a whole new understanding of that love and bond.
Because of that new understanding I have read the account of Jesus’ crucifixion from a completely different perspective, that of a mother. I have seen Mel Gibson’s “Passion” and if you have not, I think everyone should (not appropriate for children). This past Sunday my Bishop began describing Jesus’ week before His death, and then the historical facts of what he endured during the crucifixion. As he read the historical account of the crucifixion, corresponding scenes from the Passion were displayed on the big screen. Yet I saw something I had seen before, but not fully felt until then … Mary, the MOTHER of Jesus.
I watched as she followed Him, the panic, the futile efforts to protect her son. The rage, the pain she must have felt knowing that her child had been falsely accused. Did she know it was God’s will? Did that comfort her in that moment of watching her son’s torture? Did SHE think of you and me as her son hung on that cross? (I think not!)
My heart broke differently, not as a child needing forgiveness, but as a mother for another. We have all probably had friends who have lost a child. We feel for them, cry for them, and yet deep down in our hearts, we walk away knowing that it very well could be us.
Did she know when she was raising Jesus what she would have to watch Him go through, or did she like so many others, think of grandiose ideas of Him being the King? When she was following Him up the road to Golgotha, did she ask God why? Was she angry, and did she feel that all the words spoken over her son were dying with Him? Or did she know in her heart that God promised that His Word should not return void, and that no matter how dark the day seemed, His hand was in it somehow?
I can only speculate, and on this side of the resurrection it is easy to see where her faith should have been, but in the persecution itself is where the faith and love of a mother was most on display. She faced the worst possible thing imaginable, but still loved and held her son all the way to the tomb. She buried her own son, which I have been told is the most painful thing to do, but there was a promise that He would live and not die!
Because of her obedience and faithfulness to God, we also have the promise that we and our children shall live and NOT DIE!
