Holy Saturday

Eve(I wrote and posted this years ago. I wrote it for a Christmas Eve service, but it takes place on this day. I thought I would bring it out again.)

It was early Saturday morning when I went looking for Mary. Yesterday, Friday, had been the worst day of both of our lives. The past few days had been more than horrible. She had seen her first-born son die, and I had watched as my best friend, and the man I thought was God incarnate, give his life away uselessly on a cross. We had seen it all, some up close, other parts from a distance, but we had been there, side by side, watching it, thinking it would all change in a minute, knowing that something different, something wonderful, would happen.

But it didn’t. He died.

On Thursday night he had been taken away by the soldiers and brought before this mock trial in front of Pilot and Herod, since they were both in town. Now he’ll show them, I thought. After all, he had done that with the authorities before. We watched as he was beaten, and I held Mary as the tears ran down her face, seeing her son wear a crown of thorns, and people who he had fed and healed yell ‘crucify him.’ Crowds can turn so quickly. We had seen it before. We knew he would turn the crowds back to him. We followed behind as he was taken out to the hill to be crucified. Mary kept whispering, not to me but to herself, “I know he’ll come to save him. The Lord won’t let him down. God will come any minute now.” I felt it, too, but my hope died with each step he took. When they nailed his hands and feet to the cross, I heard Mary scream as if it were her hands that the spikes were piercing. She called out to God to come and save her son, and for a moment we thought he would. The skies got dark, the wind blew, and the earth shook. “Now God will come to us and save him,” Mary screamed through her tears.

But he didn’t.

You could tell the moment he died. His spirit had left his body. It just hung there empty, a shell of what used to be great, high on the cross for all to see. The wind stopped blowing, the clouds grew lighter, the earth stopped moving. Everything was back to normal. And we just stood there, looking at the body hanging on the cross. When a soldier rammed his spear into the side to make sure he was dead, when that spear entered his heart, Mary was leaning against me and I felt her heart break, too.

A few minutes earlier, before he had died, he had looked at his mother and said, “Mom, John will take care of you.” Then he looked over at me and said, “John, watch after Mom.”

So, while friends took the body off the cross, I held her close to me. Then, when the body was lying on the ground, she walked over to it, held it close to her, as only a mother can, and brushed the hair out of his eyes. Our friends wrapped his body and took him away to be buried before we had time to prepare him with the oils used for burial. It was getting dark, the Sabbath was about to begin. I took Mary back to Bethany to stay at home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. She didn’t go to the temple or the synagogue that night. She just sat there, numb. I left the house to stay with others.

This morning I found her in the courtyard, sitting on a bench, leaning against the wall of the house. I looked at her and she looked old beyond her years. For the first time, I could not see the young girl in her anymore. She must not have been more than 48, but she looked like she was 90, older than Sarah, Abraham’s wife. She was gaunt and wrinkled and hunched over and frail. You could tell she had not slept at all.

“How are you?” I asked.

“It seems like it was only yesterday,” she said, answering a question that I did not ask.

“Mary….it was yesterday,” I said. “He died yesterday.”

“No….not that…..it seems like it was only yesterday when the angel appeared to me.”

“What angel?”

“The one that told me I would have this boy if I wanted. That I could bear him into the world, but the choice was mine.” This was a story I had not heard, so I asked her to tell me about it. Maybe it would help her deal with her grief. I had said I would care for her.

“I was just a young girl, barely past the age of becoming a woman,” she said, “when I met Joseph. He was a few years older than me, and was learning his father’s trade as a carpenter. We used to steal glances at each other in the synagogue in Nazareth. We were almost immediately attracted to each other. We would ‘accidentally’ bump into each other in the market, and our hands would touch and I could feel a spark fly between us. This went on for months, and I thought I would die if I didn’t get to be with this handsome young man. I don’t know why, but something was happening between us. Finally….and I don’t know how he did it…..his father talked with my father and a marriage was arranged between us. We were engaged! We were promised to each other!” Mary’s face brightened as she recalled that time, her back straightened up, and it looked like some of the wrinkles left her face.

“The marriage ceremony was planned for 6 months later, so family would be able to save and take the time to get there. And each day just drug on forever. I thought they would never end! I could hardly wait for the day to come when I would be his wife. What could be more wonderful than marrying the person you love, spending the rest of your days with them!”

I know, I thought. I had never married, but I had felt that way before, wanting to spend every day with a certain person. But that didn’t work out. He was dead, now.

“Then it happened,” Mary said. “One evening, about 4 months before the wedding, I was behind our house in Nazareth. It was a bright, clear, star-filled night, when suddenly there was a brilliant light that flashed, almost blinding me. I thought at first it was some sort of lightning, but when my eyes could focus again, there was a giant of a man standing before me. I couldn’t tell if he was 7 feet tall, or if he just seemed that way because everything else seemed small in his presence, including me. There seemed to be some light that shone from within him, some sort of reflection of the light that had just flashed before me. He was dressed in a robe that reached the ground, but didn’t seem to be dirty anywhere. He had dark brown eyes that didn’t so much look at you as look INTO you. He stood there for a moment, and I began to back away, not looking back up at his face. “

“Then he spoke. His voice was deep. He had no question in his voice, no wavering. He said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Mary. I am Gabriel and I come from the throne of God. God has seen you and chosen you. You will have a child, a boy, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.’”

“ ‘How can this be?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never….been…with a man.’ He told me that the Holy Spirit would do something wonderful, something miraculous in me, and that way I would know it was God’s son. Then he just stood there, like he was waiting for me to say something, those dark eyes looking into my soul. It was as if he had to have my permission for this to happen.”

“What did you think?” I asked.

“Everything went through me,” she said. “What would my family think? Would they believe me? What about Joseph? Would he still marry me? How can this happen? In a just a second, I thought of all the things that might happen because of this. Then I thought, say yes! Because who knows what tomorrow may hold! So I looked at the man…the angel….and said….yes. As a matter of fact, that’s what I taught my son for all those years growing up- always say yes, because who knows what tomorrow may hold.”

I had heard Jesus say something like it several times, and now I knew where it came from, He had put it this way, “Why do you worry about tomorrow, what you shall eat and drink and wear…. God loves you so don’t worry about tomorrow….who knows what tomorrow may hold. So that’s where he got it from, his mother.

“So what happened next?” I asked, trying for a moment to get her mind away from yesterday and the terrible things we saw. “Was Joseph excited?”

“No,” Mary said, laughing at the memory. “It wasn’t funny then, but it seems so now. He was furious, just knowing that I had…been…with another man. All this stuff of flashing light and angels seemed like a lie to cover up my sin to him. Even my parents agreed and were ashamed of me. But he loved me, and though he was hurt, didn’t want to shame me in public. He was going to break the engagement privately and send me away. But then that same man, the angel, showed up at his house and helped him to…uh…see the light. And though he didn’t understand it he decided to go ahead and marry me, but not until after the child was born.”

“What about your parents?” I asked.

“When I got to where I began to show,” she said, looking down at her stomach, “they sent me away to see my cousin Elizabeth. She was old, but somehow she was pregnant, too. And my parents knew that if I was around folks would talk. So I went off to stay with her for a while.”

“While I was there Caesar Augustus decided to have a census and a taxation of the whole empire. And to make it harder for everyone, he said everyone had to go back to their ancestral homes to be registered. So Joseph came and got me and took me to Bethlehem, because that’s where his family was from. His great, great, great, great, great granddaddy was King David, you know.” I had heard this from Jesus, that he was the ‘son of David.’ As a matter of fact, that’s what the people had yelled just six days earlier as we rode into Jerusalem, “Hail the One who Comes in the Name of David!”

“You ever been to Bethlehem?” Mary asked me. “I’ve been through it,” I said, “not much there. A Podunk of a town.” 

“You’re right,” she said. And when you fill it with people who are descendants, there’s no place to stay. When we got there I was about ’12 months pregnant’ and about to pop. Joseph couldn’t find a room at the only inn in town. The only shelter was a cave used as a barn for the animals. There I had Jesus, and Joseph put fresh hay in the feeding trough, and that’s where my son slept for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last time he would not have a place to lay his head.”

“Yeah, he told us who followed him to be prepared to have no place to stay,” I said.

“Shepherds showed up and told us what seemed like incredible stories of the angels appearing to them, but we both knew what that was all about. Jerusalem’s only 6 miles from Bethlehem, so when the time came a week later, we were able to go to the Temple and present him there, something we could not have done if we were back in Nazareth.  As we were coming out of the temple, an old priest named Simeon came over, looked at my baby, and said ‘this child will be a light for the Gentiles and glory for Israel. Then he looked at me, and a strange look came on his face, and he said ‘and a sword will pierce your heart, too.’ …. How did he know?” Mary said, looking down at her feet, tears coming again.

“Tell me more. I’ve not heard these stories,” I said.

“We went back to Bethlehem, and stayed there for a while. Then came the time of the massacre…” She did not have to tell me more. I had heard stories about Mad King Herod and his ordering of the execution of male children. “…so we escaped to Egypt. After a few years we heard that Herod had died, so we went back to Nazareth. Jesus was your typical boy growing up, obeying us most of the time, but occasionally going his own way. He got lost in Jerusalem one year when we went there for the Passover,” she said, a smile coming over her face. 

“Yeah, I heard about that,” I said.

“But I gave him a talking to that he never forgot,” Mary said, “and was no trouble at all after that. As a matter of fact, he was an incredible son. Joseph died young…” Mary said, a shadow coming over her face. Jesus had never spoken to me about his earthly father, only about what he called his ‘heavenly father,’ a term he used with great familiarity. I wanted to know, but didn’t push Mary about how Joseph had died. She was already in enough pain. “….and even though Jesus knew he didn’t want to be a carpenter, that didn’t seem to be what he was born for, he took over the family business until one of his younger brothers could do it and provide for us. We were all very poor, but we worked together. Then the day came when he took me outside the home, and said ‘Mom, it’s time for me to do what I was called to do.’ I remembered what the angel had told me, and I gave him my blessings. You know the rest of the story.”

Yeah, I knew it. As a matter of fact I had lived most of it. The healings, the feedings, the miracles, the teachings, the crowds. It was so exciting. We never thought it would end this way.

I looked over at the old woman sitting on the bench. Finally I asked the question that had been building up in my heart and mind. “Mary, if you had the chance to do it again, would you say yes? You know, knowing the joys, but also the heartache and the pain, knowing what would happen, knowing about….yesterday…..would you have born Jesus into this world?” I wasn’t really asking for her. I was asking for me. You see, Jesus had told me something strange one day, something I didn’t quite understand, not sure that I really do now. He told me that I…that all of us who followed him…had to ‘bear’ him into the world, to carry him within us, sort of like having a life within that is part of you but is still not yours alone. Almost like having a baby inside, but a grown up one. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but it seems like he was saying that somehow he could live in us and in this world through us. But I saw what happened yesterday. I’m not sure I could handle it. So I had to know. “Mary, would you say yes again?”

She looked up at me and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “because who knows what tomorrow may hold.”

We just sat there for a few minutes, not saying a word. Finally I said, “Get some rest today. I’ll get the ointments so that tomorrow morning we can go and properly prepare his body.” “Okay,” she said, and leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. 

I walked away, leaving her in the courtyard. I thought, “Would I say yes? Then I thought, “Who knows what tomorrow may hold?”