“We Were There: Lenten Edition,” Week Five
My name is Mary. No, not that one. And no, not the other one, either.
I know that among my Lord’s disciples, being named Mary is like being Jane Smith. But I ask of you, look beyond our shared name to what we did—what sets us apart, our triumphs and our successes and, here, at the cross, our greatest sorrows and losses.
It would be tempting enough to not be here, to be anywhere else at all, to indulge the denial, to hope against hope that everything that has transpired would not end in execution.
Yet how could I not be here to bear witness to what has happened? Someone had to be, to tell the truth in case His executioners do not. My Lord’s male disciples have all fled, probably suspecting that the Romans see them as potential threats after the arrest, but because of my gender, the Romans do not think such things about me, or about the other female disciples of Jesus here with me. They do not think that a mother can hold a candle to their Caesars.
But oh, how wrong they are. They absolutely should see me as a threat.
For I will tell the world what the empire has done to my Messiah. Of what He gave up for me—for all of us. That He told us He would return even after this. That death will not hold him forever. I know where He has been buried, and I know that tomb will not hold Him. Not forever.
I will emerge victorious because He will emerge victorious. And a victorious woman is not whom the empire is expecting.
This is a sermon series I am excited for in our first Lenten season together. Across the board, feedback concerning Valley’s Advent devotional series, We Were There, was overwhelmingly positive, especially for the first-person voice it was composed in by its many contributors. Buoyed by this feedback, Dr. Lola Kiser and I crafted a similar focus for both our upcoming Holy Week devotional book and this sermon series as a way to lead up to that devotional. This means that each Sunday through Lent, all the way up to Easter Sunday, my message will begin in the first-person, through the eyes of someone who would have experienced Holy Week, just as we did with Advent.
We began this series four weeks ago with Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead earlier in John 11, and since then we have visited the stories—and possible words—of Caiaphas the high priest by continuing verse-by-verse through John 11 before hopping over to Mark 15. There, we heard from Simon of Cyrene before arriving last week at the centurion at the foot of the cross. Today, we hear from one of the female disciples of Jesus who served as eyewitnesses not only to the empty tomb in two weeks’ time, but to the crucifixion as well as the burial: Mary, the mother of James and Joses.
We know very little about Mary the mother of James and Joses, in contrast with Mary the mother of Jesus, of whom we know at least some details, and Mary Magdalene, of whom what we think we know may not be correct. And especially after our deep dive two weeks ago on Simon of Cyrene, it seems to bear spiritual fruit to lend an ear to those whom we know the least. Mark says that this Mary was joined by both Mary Magdalene and Salome; the former is a voice in our upcoming Holy Week devotional booklet, and the latter will be one of our voices on Easter Sunday. So, let us continue our time at the foot of the cross by moving our attention from the centurion last week to this particular Mary.
The James whom this Mary is the mother of is traditionally thought to be James the younger—one of the apostles but not James the brother of John or James the brother of Jesus. So in addition to multiple mothers named Mary, we have multiple sons named James, so at this point I should probably just start handing out baseball scorecards to help us keep them all straight.
As I noted, of all the Marys, we probably know the least about this Mary, the mother of James the younger and Joses. Mark tells us that Mary and the other female disciples of Jesus had arrived in Jerusalem with Him from Galilee, where they had followed and provided for Him. We should probably take that latter detail to mean that they were among the primary financial backers of Jesus’s ministry. Of the male apostles of whom we know their occupations, those occupations generally entailed subsistence-level work like fishing—Levi the tax collector was a notable exception.
Such subsistence-level work was really that—subsistence-level. There was no real middle class in ancient Israel like there is today. There was the ruling class of occupying Romans and their local client kings, and a small middle class of sorts of merchants, scribes, and similar vocations. Everybody else, the vast majority of the populace, engaged in subsistence-level labor.
For reasons unknown to us, though, Mary the mother of James and Joses, along with Mary Magdalene and Salome, had the means to provide for Jesus’s ministry in the Galilee, and went with Him to Jerusalem to continue that support. So she—and they—can be seen stepping up in a couple of capacities in which the male apostles do not or cannot. First, the female disciples are providing financially for Jesus’s ministry in a way that not all the male disciples likely could. And second, here, the female disciples are providing spiritually in a way that the male apostles either could not or would not. Again—the male apostles are all in hiding by this point in the Passion narrative. Jesus’s female disciples are the only ones the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us remained with Him to the very end.
If you have ever sat at the bedside of a dying loved one, you know firsthand what profound gift that ministry of presence is. Yes, it is for yourself as well—to squeeze in every possible moment you can with your loved one before they pass—but it is also an act of service to them. And in Mary’s case, it is a brave act of service, of composure, of devotion.
And here is the most important part of that reality: of all the roles of all the people we have visited so far in this sermon series, Mary’s is by far the most accessible to us.
We do not expect to be raised from the dead in this lifetime, as Lazarus was. We do not expect to rule as high priest, as Caiaphas did. We do not expect to be pressed into literally carrying crossbeams for people condemned to die, as Simon of Cyrene did—although we certainly are in a spiritual sense. And, I would hope, we would not ever personally execute someone, as the centurion did.
But to be present as a beloved is dying, to bear witness to their death and burial? That we can all do. That we are all capable of, potentially through great tears and anguish, but we are capable of that.
So Mary, in her courage and composure, opens up the crucifixion to us in a way that none of our characters have previously—although each of them, in their own way, does come close. The other characters we have met so far could be us in truly extraordinary circumstances. But we each could be Mary in relatively universal circumstances—of being there as a loved one dies.
That, I hope, should be enough to see ourselves in her. We cannot, and must not, try to pigeonhole her into assorted stereotypes the way we have with Mary Magdalene, or with stock female characters across so much of our literature, not just the Bible. Mary the mother of James and Joses stands on her own, by her own witness, and as a moral example to each of us because she shows us how important our presence can truly be.
So do not sell yourselves short, church. The empire surely
did with the collection of women who bore witness to the crucifixion of the
Messiah. But we should not. In these acts of witness and presence we can
confound arbitrarily low expectations, we can be the love of Christ incarnated
in this world, and we can emerge victorious in Christ because it was so for
Mary, the mother of James and Joses. Just as the temple curtain being torn
asunder should represent to us an opening up of God’s presence achieved by the
crucifixion, we should also see in Mary an opening up of Christ’s victory to us
that is achieved in the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. They are parallels, and we should see them as such. The temple curtain being torn in two represents God's opening up to us, and Mary's devotion to Jesus right up until the end represents the opening up of us to God.
She emerges from this victorious because Christ will emerge from this victorious. And because of that, we can emerge from our own moments of ministry of presence similarly victorious. As we move deeper into the death narrative part of the Passion this week and next, may we honor the additional meaning lent to the crucifixion by the presence of Mary and her compatriots. The meaning of Christ dying on the cross is itself sufficient, but there is a big difference between “sufficient” and “maximized.” Mary, by the strength and courage of her witness, helps maximize the meaning of the crucifixion for us.
May we, in turn, do the same: may our presence in the lives of others maximize the meaning of Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. And may our witness of Christ’s work in our lives serve to maximize the glory of God from generation to generation.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 21, 2021