It must touch the heart with a sense of awe to ponder Mary's role as the bearer of the incarnate Son of God into the world. Her body was honoured - or should one say burdened - with the Incarnation. Warburton Lewis: "The incarnation had its beginning when Mary said, "Into thy hands I commend my body," and reached its fulfilment when Jesus said, 'Into Thy hands I commend my Spirit.'" (adapted)
She would have been a teenager at the time - sixteen or so. As the implications of the angel's message dawned on her she must have been deeply troubled. What would people say …? But she yielded herself fully to God and trusted Him for what should become of her. The sort of temper and cast of mind that was hers is revealed in her language, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy word." She was, to use H. H. Farmer's phrase, "far gone in readiness for God." A remarkably devout girl, though it would have been a simple and sincere devotion.
The journey to Bethlehem must have been a relief in one way … it took her away from all those scurrilous tongues in Nazareth, for a cloud of suspicion hung over all her life, and over her son. Years later, the Pharisees would say, with withering scorn, "We be not born of fornication."
But it was an anxious journey too - all depended on the footfall of a donkey! She bore her Babe in unhygienic circumstances, without benefit of midwife (as far as one can tell).
God did not seemed to have planned things with her convenience in mind!
What did she make of the tale the shepherds brought of their vision in the hills? What did she make of the strange visit of the Magi? What did she make of those episodes in the Temple with Simeon and Anna? And having to flee from Herod … ? What did she later feel for the women back there in Bethlehem who had lost their sons?
Then that little cameo of domestic crisis when Jesus, at the age of his Bar-Mitzvah, got lost to them in their homeward caravan, and they found him in the Temple, a child genius in the area of religion. It is said, "She didn't understand Him then."
Small wonder "she pondered these things in her heart."
Then, when they would all have expected him to carry the proper burden of family responsibility, He insisted on going off to pursue His mad dream, to preach!
This was surely a time when "a sword pierced her soul."
However bravely and gallantly she coped with his firm, though kindly rebuke at the wedding feast in Cana, she knew that day that she had 'lost' Him to a purpose and a cause far higher than any she could offer, or compete with, or even perhaps comprehend (what did He mean, "My hour has not yet come?"). She had implicit trust in Him, in His judgment and His intentions, though … "Whatever He says to you, do it." She knew He would do something! That can only have been borne of her thirty years' experience of Him in the home. She knew the sort of man He was.
Then there was the evident distress and embarrassment later when "His mother and His brothers" came to fetch Him home, because He had become an embarrassment to them. If today a young carpenter started out by putting Bishops and Cabinet Ministers in their place he would make his family look ridiculous in the eyes of neighbours. Imagine what Mary had to take from the brothers at home. Remember the episode later still when they "took the mickey" out of Him because He said He was not going up to the Feast … and then He went. "He's a fraud, a hypocrite," they said. (John 7:1-10) "His brothers did not believe in Him." They despised and repudiated Him.
When He said, "A prophet is not without honour save in his own country, and among his own kindred and in his own home," and "A man's enemies shall be those of His own household," He spoke from experience! That episode, incidentally, recorded only in John's Gospel, is an interesting bit of evidence for the relationship there was later between Mary and John, after he had taken her to his own home. In Mary, John had a source of information the other Gospel writers did not have. The two of them must have talked of many things in later years. How much input did Mary have into the making of John's Gospel?
He was misunderstood and "put down" at home, and Mary had to cope with that. She would not have enjoyed it; she had memories from His infancy the others did not have and could not appreciate. She must have struggled with these things often. For I believe she was proud of Him, baffled by Him though must also have been.
She made a home for Him.
She loved Him from first to last.
She never attempted to dominate Him.
She maintained the family unity.
His arrest and trial and crucifixion must have been painful in the extreme.
When did she receive the news of His arrest? Where was she then? With whom was she staying, and what support did she have from them? It could hardly have been John; he had gone with Peter …
It was all so disgraceful and wretchedly public (the Romans marched the prisoners to their execution the long way round). He was reduced to such an extreme of suffering and humiliation, robbed of all human rights and dignity. She would have bled for Him, for she watched it all through.
A. E. Whitham, "The nails driven through His hands were driven through hers. The jar as the Cross with His body nailed to it was dumped into its socket must have torn her nerves and wrenched her bones as they did His. The thirst that inflamed His mouth scorched hers. She was in travail again for Him."
"There stood by the Cross of Jesus Mary His mother." John 19.25
She was not old, certainly not yet 50.
Images from across the years would have crowded into her mind.
She could remember, watching Him there suffering so terribly - looking alien and inhuman (Isaiah 53) - she could remember as others could not, saying prayers with Him at night when He was a child, the warmth of Him nestling into her bosom, the brightness of his laughter and the ravishing winsomeness of his child nature. How she had loved Him!
Then He "got his strange ideas" … went off into the hills alone … had long discussions with the local rabbi far into the night … read and read and read the scrolls in the local synagogue (she would never have been able to afford a Bible). Then He went off, preaching … and upset people, nice respectable people too.
And there was that day when He said, unwilling to come out and meet her, "Those who did the will of God were His mother, and His brothers." (Matthew 12:46-50) A sword pierced her soul that day. Had she not done the will of God for Him? It is a miracle she was not mortally offended.
We might recall here the episode on the way to the Cross, to which she was probably witness. When the women of Jerusalem bewailed his plight, crying, "Blessed be the womb that bore you and the breasts that suckled you," Mary might have felt a moment of pride shine through her distress, but then she heard her own beloved son reply, "Nay, rather, blessed are who hear God's word and keep it." Was she to be spared nothing?
She must in some degree have "lost track of Him."
But her intuitions always overrode her reasoning, and she believed in Him, no matter how bewildered or distressed she was. Some woman, this!
What was going on in her mind and heart as she watched Him there? What had it all come to? All those marvellous promises given to her by the angel, by Simeon and Anna; all that talk of fulfilling some grand destiny God alone had reserved for Him. How could she reconcile that with this?
Then Jesus remembered her, "Lady, behold your son. Son, behold your mother."
What did she make of that?
Kind? … yes; she knew she stood secure in His love. But if you think about it, cruel too. He was handing her on. She wasn't his any more, not even when she could have hoped He would need her most, when He was dying!
It is a situation that has the epic proportions of a Greek tragedy. It is not a small domestic trifle - just another mum who did not understand her son and wasn't understood by him either. She had lost Him to some awesome, divine purpose which soared far above her comprehension.
Easter day must only have served at first to bewilder her even more. How could she recognise in one who returned after death strangely transfigured her own human son? What on earth was going on?
Can we understand the pathos of the necessary journey she had to make? I have drawn out the two streams of experience that were hers: on the one side the warm, loving, mother-son bondedness, and on the other the progressive "distancing" of the relationship in our Lord's ministry years.
To fulfil her rôle as a mother to the incarnate Son of God, she had to relate to her son as fully, as richly, as deeply, as lovingly as it is possible for a mother to do. The bond between them, of mother and son, had to be as strong as such a bond can be.
Then that relationship built over the years from infancy had all to be undone. The bond so forged must be broken, just so that she could relate to Him as we do … not as "her darling boy", but as the divine Saviour of her soul, as the Lord who stood to her soul in the place of God Himself; not as her son but as God's Son. In Paul's words she had to learn that, "even if we have known Christ after the flesh, now know we Him thus no longer." She may possess Him only as all others may, by the Spirit of adoption that makes Him ours and us His. She must lose Him (in the natural sphere) to gain Him (in the salvation sphere).
Was it all wasted then, all those years of experience with Him? Was it all to no purpose in the end? Surely not. True, you hear little of her after Pentecost; but she did not "fade out" to no purpose, like some defeated soul who had lost her way. She had always "pondered things in her heart" and I think she continued to do this. How much did she come to understand in later years? Much I think.
She stayed within the Christian Church … and she lived out her days with John. I wonder how much of the sheer beauty, simplicity and profundity of John's Gospel we owe to her, to the interaction of her mind and soul with his? It is not a thought that is often put forward, but I have sometimes pondered it: how far should we understand John's Gospel to be the "Gospel according to Mary"?
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