Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday December 1, 2024 (Advent 1)
Scripture: John 19:18-30
This is the first week of a 4-week (plus Christmas Eve) story-telling
series. Mary, the mother of Jesus, begins her story this week at the foot of
the cross, and will go back to tell the “beginning of the beginning” of the
story over the following weeks.
“It is finished.” Those are the last
words that my baby boy spoke before he breathed his last. “It is finished.”
Many years have passed now since that grief-filled day on a hill outside of Jerusalem. I’m an old woman now, even though in my heart I’m still a young woman and Jesus is still my baby boy. I spend my days thinking back to when I was truly young – when I was a young girl running over the hills of Galilee, watching the butterflies, collecting flowers for my mother’s table, listening to the birds calling as they flew overhead, feeling the wind tugging at my hair when it inevitably slipped out of its braid.
I also think back to the days when I was a young mother, and Joseph my beloved was busy with his carpentry, and I had a house full of children to raise. Jesus, my first-born, was sometimes full of mischief, sometimes lost in his thoughts, but always curious and always kind and caring, not only to his family but also to our neighbours, and even strangers and foreigners who would sometimes pass through our village.
Later on, after Joseph, my beloved, had died, Jesus took on the responsibility of the first-born and made sure that I was cared for. Even in his dying moments, he made sure that I would have a home and a family after he was gone.
I do remember the time when he was only 12, just on the threshold of becoming a man, when we were travelling home from the temple in Jerusalem with the other families from our village. The other mothers and I were watching our younger children, so we were half-way home before I realized that I was missing one of my children. What a fright I had that day, thinking that I had lost my first-born! Though from where I am now, I know that the fright of that day was nothing compared with the horror of actually losing him. It turns out his curiosity about God-whose-name-is-Holy had kept him back in the temple, questioning the elders, and listening to their wisdom and their stories.
There was another time, after my baby had become an adult and was making his way in the world, when we ended up at a wedding together. It was a wedding between one of the girls from our village of Nazareth and a young man from the village of Cana, just a few miles away. Because I was a widow, Jesus, my first-born, accompanied me to the celebration. There was music and dancing and singing, but then word reached the women’s tent that the wine was about to run out. Oh, the shame that this would have brought to both families, if they weren’t able to extend the hospitality that was expected of them. I knew that my boy would be able to do something about it, so I went to him and I pleaded with him to do something, and wouldn’t you know, the stone vessels that had held water were then filled with wine, better than the best wine you have ever tasted, and the joy and the celebration could continue.
I was part of the group that traveled with him as he went around Galilee and into Jerusalem, teaching and healing people. I could hear the words that I sang to him when he was a baby echoing in his teaching, as he showed people that a different world was possible – as he taught people that God-whose-name-is-Holy has a dream for the world where all hungry people are well fed, where oppressors and tyrants have lost their power, where only love reigns. I mean, you only needed to see him feed a crowd of thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish to know that he trusted in the words of that lullaby I used to sing to him: “God has filled the hungry with good things, and has sent the rich away empty.”
I know that your book just gives you the names of the men who followed him, but we were a much larger crowd than the ones who are named. Why, some days he travelled with over 100 people following after him, listening to what he was teaching and watching to see what miracle he would do next. And of course there were women as part of his group! And of course his mother would be part of his group!
When we entered Jerusalem that last time, we all knew that things probably weren’t going to go well. Tensions were high. All along, Jesus had been provoking the people in power with what he was saying and doing. The people with the power were afraid that they were going to lose their power, so they were ready to do whatever they needed to do in order to preserve the status quo.
And yet. Yet even so, I don’t think that I ever considered that things could go as badly as they did. I thought that they might torture my boy, or arrest and imprison him, but I don’t think that I had let myself consider that they might execute him. After all, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly.
And yet somehow I found myself on the side of the hill that day, watching my boy in agony, struggling to draw a breath, slowly suffocating. How could my treasured baby have ended up here? My heart was a shriek of anguish that day, drowning out anything else. Maybe we were in danger too, as his followers, but at that point I didn’t care.
“It is finished.” Those are the last words he managed to gasp out before we saw the life fade from his eyes. Yet from where I am now, I know that it wasn’t truly finished. In that moment, I didn’t know what was going to happen just two days later. I didn’t know that the grave was going to be empty. I now know that that moment on the cross wasn’t the end, it was only the end of the beginning of his story. He hadn’t been my little boy for many years now; and since that day I now know that he belongs to the whole world.
That day was only the end of the beginning of his story. I’d like to tell you more, about the beginning of the beginning, if only you will come back to listen to me. There is so much more that I want to share with you.
Crosses in the chapel of Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal
Wuppertal, Germany
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