One Friday 2

“Mary, you’re not to go out to see him,” James said  earlier that week. “It’s dangerous for a man, for you— I forbid it!”

She had promised herself she wouldn’t weep. And she didn’t.

James was ten when she married Joseph, the son of his first wife, who died in childbirth with her sixth child. Mary felt Joseph’s first family never approved of her. Though they never said so, she thought they even believed the rumor that she was pregnant by a Roman soldier.

 ”He’s acting crazy. Parading into Jerusalem like some kind of Messiah! Turning the Temple upside down—the Temple, Mary! Driving out the lambs and the pigeons! Or was it the traders, even the priests, that he imagined on the tip of his whip! Who does he think he is!”

She’d heard that whiny criticism all Jesus’ life. Joseph’s first family  were jealous of him. Deep down, they knew he outclassed them. The more gentle and humble he was, the more sullen and hostile they were.

“You remember Joseph’s brothers?” she said. “You’re no better!”

“Don’t set one foot out of this house!” James insisted.

After all the men had gone, Mary knew she had lost precious minutes.

Though, James had a point. Jerusalem wasn’t safe, especially with the people aroused as they were now, especially for a Galilean, an older woman who weighed scarcely 90 pounds. She didn’t know the streets of the Holy City well. After Joseph died she had stayed in Nazareth during passover.

No matter. Jesus was not going to die alone!

The sun began its ascent above the horizon; clouds crowded the skies, as if all heaven were gathering to watch him die.

The Son of God.

Her son.

Where are the angels now, the warrior angels, the angel of death who saved a whole nation from the Egyptians! she wondered.

Send twelve legions of angels! she prayed silently. He is your Son, isn’t he?

She didn’t know these streets. They were supposed to…

She wasn’t demon possessed, was she? All these years, a hoax of the devil?

Smaller and smaller steps led her into a maze of narrow stone roads, walled with houses all around her. She didn’t recognize them. She turned one way, then another, until at last she simply laid her face against a wall of peeling, dirty plaster.

*Shaddai!” she sobbed. “Why are you silent? I can’t, I can’t—”

“Mary!”

It was a soft voice, it was John, the young boy whom Jesus loved best among the disciples, she thought. Although Jesus had no favorites—he loved them all, especially young John.

Anguish darkened his tone. ” Mary! What are you doing here! We’ve been frantic to find you!”

Confused, Mary looked around. Nothing was familiar, except the boy, now a man, but to her, a boy.

“Where is this place?” she asked.

“You want to be with him?”

Stifling pain and exhaustion, she jerked her head. Of course, where else would she be?

“Come, then.”

He led her along narrow alleys and tracks made by animals and slaves. Not far she heard sounds of the mob, jeers and cries, shouted curses, harsh orders.

Then, John led her into the main road, through the gate of the city to a place that beggared imagination for its horror.

Heaps of garbage, from which came thick oily smoke. The picked clean carcasses of dogs, possums, hare, the feathers, claws, skulls of birds.

Beyond them a hill. She shuddered, imagining in the rock before her a massive forehead, the eye sockets of a skull. Golgotha. She’d heard her sons speak of this place, but she thought they were exaggerating, trying to scare her.

John  whispered to a slave, who disappeared in the crowds that gathered in clumps. Priests and scribes here. Pharisees there. They had slaves rake the ground before them, to keep from being contaminated by the litter of death all around them. On three crosses were stretched the bodies of men who had been human before they were tortured; remains of other crosses lay about on the ground.

In a few minutes the slave returned, escorting a woman Mary knew well: Magdalene. And with her were others.

They surrounded Jesus’ mother as she drew near the cross.

John approached the centurion. “This is the mother of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The sun-hardened centurion eyed her. She imagined that compassion flickered in his eyes, then it was gone. He was his mother’s son, after all.

He nodded, and turned away.

Magdalene and John supported her on either side, as she drew near to the cross.

At eye level were his bony feet, secured to the wood with a massive nail.

From somewhere deep within she gained strength to stand alone, and gently she shrugged the others off. Without flinching she looked up at the body, bruised and torn, blood blackened in strips, welts, across the rib cage.

She had to do this alone. Who but she could grasp the horror of her son dying a death designed to be slow, with maximum torment!

Close to the crosses the soldiers had made a small fire, which sputtered in the wind. Drops of rain stung as if flung from a slingshot.

The squad on crucifixion detail were allowed to drink. They cast bones for the condemned man’s seamless tunic. Others, sober, several arm’s lengths removed, stood guard to protect them from the crowd.

By now there was no light but the torches, blown to dim tatters by the wind, and the soldier’s fire.

Clouds had put out the sun. Deafening cracks of thunder exploded in the sky, the ground shuddered. But there was no lightening.

Above the shrieks of the wind, Mary heard Jesus scream, “Eloi! Eloi! Lema sabachthani!”

Mary couldn’t have prayed even that cry of agony because she couldn’t make sense of God any more.

She had often wondered if she had dreamed the angel who startled her with, “Hail, thou art highly favored!” Surely Joseph’s stubborn loyalty to her was no dream, his quiet pride at the birth of her firstborn son—what would he think now? She couldn’t think of the rest, the others who gathered at his birth. A strange foreign face, a language she couldn’t understand, bowing; inside a golden case a jar of myrrh. Who’d give such a thing to a baby! Skies full of angels she saw but couldn’t hear in memory. A few weeks after the family returned to Nazareth, the women laughed when she came to the well “You know who he looks like, your Jesus?” they said “That Roman who was so-o-o smitten with you that goy! what was his name!” Laughter— but guttural slurred from thick lips of a helmeted face

yourkid aRomanbastard? somebodysaystome, lookit! Isays therebetweenhislegsthebastard surelooksjewishtome hahahaa

The centurion stood between a red puffy face in armor and her. “Back to your post!”

Nosir’struesomeguytoldme’spaterwasaRomanhonest

The centurion shouted, “Back to your post!”

The soldier turned about, too drunk to perform the maneuver sharply.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the centurion said to her.

“My son!”

The Roman caught John’s eye. “Take her home,” he said.

Even the sober staggered in this dark wind.

Mary could no longer remember a time when clouds had not roiled overhead, choking off light, or crosses had not groaned in the wind. She couldn’t remember anything, but that moment. Looking at John, when he stepped forward at the centurion’s bidding, she couldn’t remember who he was.

“Woman.”

Gently in grave pain, Jesus spoke to her.

He might have called her, Mother. But somehow “Woman” was what he needed to call her. She felt, though he clearly meant her,  he was speaking to her for the sake of all women. That was what she felt, because she couldn’t think.

The pain was still there, the dark, the sneers, the Romans.

But she felt saved from all the dangers that had been threatening her all that day.

His eyes moved from embracing her alone, and now included John. “Here is your son,” Jesus said. He had difficulty speaking. He couldn’t get much breath. But she heard him plainly.

To John he said, “Here is your mother.”

That’s why, when she left there, she went home with John, and stayed. Never returned to the house of James and the other brothers.

She passed the remainder of that day sheltered by the five words Jesus spoke to her: “Woman, here is your son.”

The worst had passed, but terrifying moments were still to come.

When, with the centurion overseeing, they lifted the cross from its hole in the rock-hard, slick ground and laid it down. When they pried the nails loose from Jesus’ hands and feet. When they laid him in her arms.

“My son! My son!” she cried, rocking him as best she could.

She took her veil, wet with the rain, and wiped his body, wiped the blood from the wounds of his flogging and of the nails,  and of the spear run into his side.

She didn’t notice how long it was before Joseph and Nicodemus urged John to take her home. If she wondered, “How can that young boy be strong enough to pull me from the body, to lift me and carry me,” she didn’t remember.

He did. So they told her. She didn’t remember anything, but Jesus speaking from the cross to her.

(to be continued)