Woman, Behold, Your Son

Same song, next verse, eight months later. Last night my 10 year old son and I experienced a feeling of deja vu as we traveled to the same emergency room to have the same foot x-rayed so a (different!) doctor could tell us that he had fractured his ankle the same way he did eight months ago. Same injury, different season.

Now, instead of trying to figure out how to keep toes warm in 40 degree weather, we have to figure out how to keep a cast dry in swimming pool season. This too shall pass. Of course our emergency room visit took a while and we got home at bedtime needing to eat dinner.

By the time we ate and medicated and propped the foot in bed, I just wanted to collapse in my own bed. Collapse I did, but sleep wouldn't come. I kept thinking of the injury. Even though we witnessed indescribable grief and pain at the hospital, I could only think of my own baby boy and his painful injury. I kept replaying the moment in my mind over and over. I didn't even see it happen — only heard the awful wails after the fact — but I pieced together in my mind what he relayed had happened and watched it like a movie stuck on the same loop.

I finally crawled out of bed to find a new image to put in my brain. I grabbed my Bible, curled up in my chair, and started reading. "Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother ..." (John 19:25). That's as far as I could go. I thought of the horrific images Mary must have had burned into her brain. I imagined the black days between Friday and Sunday. Her baby boy lay motionless behind the stone and she longed to think of him as the pink, squishy newborn she had nursed or as the precocious young man in the temple speaking wisdom.

But she couldn't shake the image of the broken body on the cross. Was her joy complete when she saw him whole again — or could she only think of the tortured body on the cross? He forgave me for my sin that kept him nailed there — I wonder if she ever did?

Mary probably never struggled to grasp the enormity of what it cost for her to have eternal life. There was likely never a communion meal of remembrance that Mary composed a shopping list in her head or counted the minutes until the restaurant opened. The image of her own baby boy broken and nailed to a cross was a picture in a locket forever in her brain. Each moment of remembrance was filled with agony of the memory combined with flooding gratitude for what it means for each of us.

May I be Mary-minded and walk in constant remembrance and gratitude of the precious lamb of God sacrificed so that I may be pure before the throne of God.


How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death so that we may serve the living God! (Hebrews 9:14 NIV)