I stood with my feet a little wider apart -fearing I would fall. I felt utterly nauseous to my very core. Here was my son, my precious boy! My first born, my angel-promised, heaven-dwelt beauty, now marred and bleeding, contorted with the weight and agony of a sick world’s sin. The years danced before me, bewildering my spirit as the smell of death began to seep into the coldness.

I remembered the thirty four years before- the coming so unexpectedly to me of that huge, awesome messenger of the Most High. I was nothing more than a girl, sweeping the floor of my
family home, singing a shabbat song. I turned to empty the dust and sand, to clear the rubbish, to see the stranger, filling the space with a love and a dignity and a presence so terrifying and yet, so comforting. He too had come to start to clear the rubbish, and I was inextricably part of the plan.

My consciousness leaps back to the awfulness of now. I can hear Jesus moaning. Oh God! Please let him go quickly! I can’t bear it. I cloak my tear-stained face in my hands for what seems like the tenth time. Everything in me wants to hide myself from this most terrible scene. And yet I HAVE to witness it. I look up to his face. His hair matted across his forehead now. The crown of spikes digging through his skin like shards of glass. His head hangs down. His silence is almost worse than his groans. Has he gone? Is he still with me?

Then I catch my breath as another thought twists into my mind. The presents from the visitors. The myrrh… ‘Born to die.’ I had pondered it in my soul for years afterwards. And God had unleashed a tiny fragment of this awful moment to me. But surely not like this?

Then I felt him. An arm round me like a rug, warming my fears, standing with me in the blackness. I looked up, knowing already who was there. The face of John bore down on me. His eyes telling me of his unending inner screaming too. Dependable, faithful John, the intimate one, the one my Jesus, my own sweet Jesus, loved. Not that he wore this label with any false pride. That was the point; always humble, simple- hearted, straightforward, thoughtful John. What you see is what you get. Always. Eyes brimmed with the tears of a loyal, confused friend. Hurting, his sense of loss already clawing at his normal calm.

Sensing a new arrival, my boy looked forward, trying to focus through the pain and look directly. His eyes were glazed and numb with the growing despair of gnawing separation.

‘Mother… here is your son,’ he said.

‘No!’ I screamed in my soul. ‘You! You! You are my son! You are my own! You are the part of my heart split in two!’ John reached for my hand and held it firmly, his strength and weakness feeding me in equal measure, his arms encasing and understanding and feeling my fear. Then Jesus spoke a whisper in the ebbing darkness of our moment, this time to John.

‘Here is your mother.’

‘No! Don’t give me away.’ I thought. ‘ I want to belong to you! Even in this moment. I never want to belong to anyone but you!’
But he was, even then, taking care of me, knowing John would take me into his family – officially. I would never need to worry. Bread and wine would me mine. But everytime we ate them for years afterwards we tasted something of that moment. The broken body, the blood poured. It was horrific to think that it was my sin that held him up there. The nails were inconsequencial.

The handle of my mind began to turn again. But he interrupted. I remembered these last words spoken, hanging in the air like a father’s final inheritance blessing over his family.
‘Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’ This was to be his legacy.

He went quite suddenly after that. His work this side of the tomb was done. I ached for him. Wept for myself and kissed his feet before they cut him down. John steadied me in the blackness of the loss. And in that moment we sensed a world’s clock of forgiveness start ticking into being. The wide open, forced open arms of God could not get any wider.

They say that at that moment, the temple curtain was ripped in two from heaven to earth. A bit like my heart.

But that was before the beauty… just three days later, of my risen son! Back from the horror of death, scarred but whole, new but old, light in darkness, hope in the shadows of sin. I alone can say I have a son and a saviour in one man.