Storming the Cross

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and what it must have been like to witness the torture and death her son endured. I put myself in her shoes and try to imagine what I would have thought and felt to see my child treated that way.

If I had been her, I think I would have handled it completely different.

I would have talked to the disciples and gotten them to help me “work the crowd” in order to convince them to ask Pilate to release Jesus and not Barabbas. After all, he was the criminal who deserved punishment.

I would have screamed at the soldiers to stop torturing my baby, my boy.

As Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha, I would have worked to assemble a mob to storm that hill of death and rescue my son. (Come to think of it, why didn’t the disciples take it on themselves to do it?)

As the nails were driven into Jesus’s hands and feet, I would have cried and begged him to make them stop because I knew he had the power to do so.

Watching his blood run down his face, his hands, and arms and drip from his feet as his life ebbed away, I would have run to the cross, kissed his feet, and begged him one more time not to die.

And yet, Mary did none of those things, and I’m left to speculate why.

I think Mary understood Jesus better than anyone, even his disciples.

Remember when Jesus got left in Jerusalem during the family’s pilgrimage there, and they finally found him in the temple courts reasoning with the teachers? Mary, reacting like a young mother would, chastised him for making them worry. That’s when Jesus replied with the now famous line, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my Father’s business?”

The Bible says Mary and Joseph didn’t understand what he was saying, but Mary “treasured all these things in her heart.”

It seems Mary was a thinker. From that point forward, she watched his actions and listened to what he had to say, because more than anything else she wanted to understand her son. It’s what every parent wants to do.

I wonder what the Gospel According to Mary would have read like.

To me, her actions say at the end of his life she understood her son. That everything had a purpose, that more than anything else he wanted to please his heavenly father, that her heavenly father’s will held sway over everything that happened, that the Roman occupation of her country, Pilate, the Sanhedrin, the soldiers were all put in place for the accomplishing of God’s will.

She understood he was her precious boy who looked down from the cross and told his best friend, John, to take care of her.

But she also understood Jesus was the son of God.

I’m amazed by Mary.

I wish I could have known her better.

* Taken from The Wit and Wisdom of David Johnson, Volume I1: The Hairy Catfish Caper.