Lent: Week Three

"Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother"

Others, I believe, have spoken about the incredible concern that Jesus shows for others in these lines as he is experiencing the torment of the cross. Honestly, I fail to see any remarkable message in these words at all. It's not that it may not be there, they just never strike me that way.

Really, they seem profoundly ordinary - the sad duty of a dying man arranging his affairs, as it were. Death is a terrible rending of the bonds we forge in life, and the damage is worst for those who were closest to the person who dies. Even knowing the end of the story, where Jesus walks out of the grave with shining lights and angelic choruses and every pomp and circumstance you care to insert, even as he appears to hundreds of disciples, still Mary is without her son. He's not the same, and he still leaves for good all too soon. And I'll bet she still missed him.

Even with the up-close look at grief I had this last summer of a young man dead before his time, I know that his family - old friends, mother, father, sisters, and wife - will be affected in a way I can't relate to, long after it's faded to an archive of experiences for me. With the recent furor over a girl who was raped, kidnapped, and murdered (some combination of the above) in Reno, I can't help but think that the community - as engaged as it is - still doesn't relate to the situation in the same way as the family who will never see their daughter again, and who lives with a horrible picture of how ugly her final moments were. And words I could use to try and describe it only cheapen what they feel.

Jesus words are ordinary - the sort of thing that a dying person is expected to do - he doesn't, for instance, provide Mary with a bottomless jar of oil, or some miraculous provision for her needs. He simply asks John to watch over her. I'm glad that Jesus is ordinary sometimes, because it enables him to be more sympathetic to an ordinary guy like me. Jesus' death was a sad, life-changing experience for his friends and family, and we cheapen it if we forget that.