Behold Your Mother...

A Sermon originally preached on Good Friday 2023

On this day, we stand at the foot of the cross, along with Mary, the mother of the Lord. On this day, we watch just as helplessly as she does, when she feels a sword pierce her own heart, just like Simeon had foretold. It is an unthinkable thing for a parent to lose a child. Those of us who have never suffered such a loss can only imagine what’s going through Mary’s heart. Can you possibly imagine the wildness and anguish on her face as she witnesses his crucifixion?

Jesus looks down from the cross to see his mother and his Beloved Disciple. In the midst of all his suffering, he speaks out to commit them to each other’s care. On one level, this is about a son taking care of his mother. But there’s something more going on here. What do we see when we look to Mary at the foot of the cross? Is she helpless and fearful? Or is there something else to be seen here?

Mary is more than just a bit part or cameo appearance in the story of Jesus. She is actually the continuity of the story. At the Annunciation, she is the first to be told what will be so significant about this son of hers. When he is born, a group of shepherds tell everyone the remarkable things they have been told about him. Simeon says that this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel. In all these stories, Mary keeps all these things in her heart, and ponders what it all means. She is the only one, besides Jesus himself, to be present both at the manger and at the cross. From the beginning of the story until now, she has been the witness of what God is doing in Jesus of Nazareth.

Scripture tells us very little about Mary’s life before Jesus. However, we do know that Mary and Joseph lived in relative poverty. Mary gives birth to Jesus while they were helpless travellers on the road, without anyone to make room for them. She lays him down to sleep in the hay of a feeding trough.

The first visitors to the manger are shepherds: not quite outlaws, but hardly high society. Jesus’s early days are spent among the bottom rungs of society. His parents take him to the Temple for his Presentation, and they have to offer pigeons instead of a lamb, because that’s all they can afford. Later in life, Jesus will point out that foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. We are left to assume that Jesus’s home life was one like the poor have always lived. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived under the power of others, by the leave of others.

These stories show us not just the humiliations of poverty, but also the exhaustions. They show us the human weariness that sometimes wells up as longing. When Mary is told of the coming birth of the Messiah, her first reaction is not the mixture of excitement and nerves that usually goes with first-time motherhood. Instead, the song she sings is one of hope that finally the world will be set to rights. Finally the injustices and inequalities, which she has known only too well, will once and for all be resolved. She sings that:

He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away. He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel.’

She doesn’t say that God will do any of these things, but that God has already done them. He hath. From that day on, she would live her life as though God had already done these things. In her own way, Mary had been able to step out of the world of our time, and see the world from the perspective of God’s time.

And even in that moment, we see the foreshadowing of the crucifixion. A simple peasant girl sings these words full of hope, and they tell us the good news of the justice which the poor and needy have always hoped for. When we take the Magnificat seriously, we cannot think of the Christmas story as simply a charming story of a young woman and her holy child. And that changes the game for all the rest of her story. We cannot see her presence at the foot of the Cross as simply a mournful mother, weeping. She is that, but she’s not just that. From the Annunciation right up until now, she has been full of the hope of Christmas. She has spent her life pondering the words of the shepherds, of Simeon and Anna. She still trusts God to fulfil promises that go back to the Annunciation, and even further, to David, to Moses, to Abraham, and all of God’s people.

Do you think she knew that her first-born son would meet this brutal death? And yet, how could his story go any differently? Can you imagine that scattering the proud and putting down the mighty could ever be an easy ride? When God’s Messiah is revealed as the true lord of the world, surely those who had the most to lose from his coming would do everything in their power to wipe him out. We already saw foreshadowing of this when Jesus was still less than two years old. Herod slaughtered a town full of infants to try and neutralize this threat to his own power. If this was how his life began, surely nothing could be different now.

Here at the foot of the cross, there is so much more than just frailty and weakness in Mary’s face. Here at the foot of the cross, we have seen more than just frailty and weakness in the face of her son! Perhaps Mary understands that this is what this whole story has been about. It was for this reason that the Son of God took flesh in her womb all those years ago. If she knew that, what would she say now? Would she just lie down and accept the injustices and indignities of this world? From the Romans’ perspective, that’s what the message of the cross is. This is what happens when you try to mess with the status quo. In the face of her son’s suffering, would Mary simply decide that the cost of God’s kingdom was just too much?

That’s not what the Gospels tell us about Mary. This is a mother, like her son, triumphant in suffering, and victorious in sorrow. This is a mother who can say, like her son, that ‘for this reason I have come to this hour.’ Once, earlier in life, that remarkable mother was able to put into words the hope of justice for a world where most people do not have enough to eat or drink. She could see a better world than the one in which most people live under the power of others and are never safe. To that remarkable mother, Jesus now gives a new child: his Beloved disciple, this new-born Church, just learning to see in his death the fulfilment of all these hopes.

Most people would tell you that the ‘beloved disciple’ in the fourth gospel is in fact John, who is too modest to say ‘it was me’. But no one will ever convince me that it’s as simple as that. John only starts talking about the beloved disciple at the last supper, after Jesus has washed the disciples feet. We heard it last night: ‘having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’ He loved all of them: John, and his brother James, Peter, who would deny him, and Judas Iscariot, who would betray him. He washed all their feet. Once we start hearing about ‘the disciple Jesus loved’, for some reason, we start to assume that means ‘the disciple Jesus loved best,’ when that description could really be applied to any of his disciples, even you and me.

Jesus’s words to his mother and his beloved disciple are so much more than just tying up loose ends before dying. They are tender words of concern from a dying son for his aging mother. But they are not just that. They’re not even mostly that. They are the organizing of a community. To a woman who carried God within her own body, who heard, accepted, embraced, and believed the vision of God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, to this woman, the Church will be her child. And to the Church and all his beloved disciples, this powerful, prophetic woman will now be our mother, guarding us, caring for us, and teaching us to know and hope for God’s kingdom with her own deep, remarkable faith.