V 26 When Jesus saw his mother standing there beside the disciple he loved, he said to her, “Dear woman, here is your son.
For three brief years Mary watched Jesus as he went about teaching and doing good. His busy-ness sometimes seemed madness to Mary and the rest of the family. It was Mark who noted in chapter 3 of his gospel ‘One time Jesus entered a house, and the crowds began to gather again. Soon he and his disciples couldn’t even find time to eat. When his family heard what was happening, they tried to take him away. “He’s out of his mind,” they said.’
And then the opposition mounted, and Mary must have felt the fulfilment of the prophecies of 30 years earlier was on the horizon. The thoughts and terrors of her son suffering and she herself enduring the heartache of it all, must have gripped her imagination. Surely he could step back and find a safer path through life to do the Father’s will? What mother could ever think otherwise?
So to the final agony, watching him nailed to a rough wooden cross, and hoisted aloft for the mob to jeer at him. Mary – this is your infant, toddler, teenager, carpenter son, what do you make of God’s promises of him being a Saviour now?
As she stood by the cross, alongside the Apostle John, she could only faintly hear his dying bequest – ‘here is another son – he will care for you.’
Stand alongside Mary for a moment today – can you even begin to feel the suffering she endured? This was her son – hanging limply dead on a Roman cross. The one she had nurtured and loved had been cruelly taken from her; the sheer desolation is unimaginable. What will you do now Mary?