Finding Ourselves in Easter - Part 2

As part of an ongoing series of posts, we're thinking about how we fit in the story of Easter. In Part 1, I described how we might find ourselves in the experiences of the Roman soldiers - finding Jesus to be largely irrelevant to our lives.

In this post we contemplate Mary, the mother of Jesus, and how we can identify with her experience of that event.  



John 19
²⁵ Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. ²⁶ When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” ²⁷ and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.


As she watches the events of the crucifixion unfold, it isn’t hard to imagine what Mary, his mother might have been feeling. As a parent, I’ve learned that one of the worst feelings you can have is to be helpless when your child is suffering. There seems to be within us a powerful biological instinct to protect our children. As the mother of Jesus, what agony must she have experienced to see her child tortured and killed?

But of course He was more than just her child. She had been chosen by God to carry, birth, raise, nurture, and protect, this Savior, this long-waited-for Messiah. What powerful feelings of failure to carry out God’s mission might she have suffered from that day? The Messiah was supposed to be a rescuer - one who would institute a new world order...and to see him killed, one can only imagine the depths of despair she must have felt as the promises she had believed all her life came crashing down around her. 

Maybe you've been there. Maybe you've lost a child, and trying to understand how God could allow it leaves you tortured at the very depths of your soul. Or maybe you haven't lost a child to death, but you feel as if the choices your child has made have removed them from your life physically, emotionally, or relationally,  and you share with Mary a deep sense of loss.

Or maybe your child is in a place in their lives that seems as if everything has gone terribly wrong, and you find yourself struggling with feelings of failure. We are quick to blame parents as a culture, and many of us are quick to blame ourselves, even for seemingly small variations in our children's lives.

Maybe like Mary, it seems hard to see how the terrible circumstances of your child's life could ever be "okay", or how God could ever redeem or rescue them. And all those hopes and dreams, all the promises you believe for their lives seem to have come crashing down.

When I first wrote this a year ago, I was preparing for a dedication service for my daughters and a bunch of other young kids in our community. I remember feeling like I was staring into an abyss as I thought about all the terrible things that could happen in their lives. Only a few months prior we had watched the trial of an 8 year-old who was brutally abducted, raped, tortured, and killed. As images went through my head, I wondered what kind of God I was dedicating my kids to, what words could I say that didn't feel like platitudes in light of the darkness that will surround my kids as they grow up.

And as I put myself in Mary's shoes, I realized, that God would not necessarily spare them from terrible suffering. That I might have to even witness it. But I was dedicating them and myself to live  lives that reflect this greatest of realities - the empty tomb. The reality that God will not be thwarted. That not even crucifixion of the Messiah, the ultimate in worst case scenarios, is too much for a God who is involved and rescuing creation from itself. The reality that God is redeeming all things, even the suffering and loss of our children.