Grace full mama

Everyone pictures Mary as the serene young mother, worshipping the saviour she just gave birth to. Even that, I think, is a little more cleaned up in our pictures and minds than it should be. Childbirth is messy and exhausting. Learning how to breastfeed a baby is hard and seldom comes perfectly naturally. Mary was completely human, she was no expert mama, and I’m sure she was a little frazzled as she learned the ropes with this precious new little boy that she held close to her.

But… what about Good Friday Mary? What about Mary thirty something years later, watching her boy be beaten; nailed to that cross, and killed? I am a mother. I know something of the way that a mother feels everything her children go through. Those were the cheeks she had dried tears off of, the head that she had kissed as his hair went from downy soft baby fuzz that smelled impossibly incredible, to little boy curls, to thick manly hair. Those were the toes she had nibbled playfully, the feet she had washed. Those were the hands that she had held.

Mary had held her boy a million times. She had comforted him, and she had loved him with everything that she had. She didn’t know the future. Mary had known she would have Jesus miraculously, but she had no way of knowing that he would rise again three days after he died.

“Then Jesus shouted again and he released his spirit. At that moment the curtain in the sanctuary of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, rocks split open, and tombs opened. “Matthew 27:50

No one there could have missed the impact the moment that Jesus gave up his spirit. But I wonder if Mary did. I am sure that her heart must have cracked in two along with the rocks that split open. Her anguish would have been incredible as not only did she watch her precious little boy die a slow and horrific death, but all of her hopes of Jesus liberating them all from the Roman Empire died with him.

I would bet that Good Friday is the day that Mary’s heart broke.

How often, like Mary must have, do we see the death of our dreams and despair? We so easily forget that God is bigger than even death. Our God is bigger than the biggest thing that sets fear into the pit of our stomachs. Sunday is coming, my friends. This pain that we go through on earth, the disappointments, the death, whether physical death or the death of hopes, dreams and relationships, is but a weekend in his book. He has overcome death. He conquered it, for all of us, for all time when he died on the cross. When everyone thought Jesus came to fight and win a military battle against the Roman Empire, he had actually come to fight and win a battle against death and darkness for everyone… including those in the Roman Empire. His victory was bigger than anyone even dreamed to ask or imagine.

He is the same. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His victory in your life will be bigger than anything you dreamed to even ask him for.

Lift your face up, dear Mary. Your redeemer lives. Sunday is coming.