"Good Friday": Death on a Friday Afternoon "Woman behold your son.. Behold your mother"
The Time has come!
The Cross casts its long shadow!
John 17:1
17 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:
“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.
How is it that this event, this evil becomes Glory?
The Cross and what Christ did for humanity through it is one of the worlds greatest mysteries. To realize that from the time of Adam's sin that this has been the plan woven as it is through humanity until the end of all things!
Let us humble ourselves!!
After the mock trial, cruel verbal taunts, the whipping and the crown of thorns we find Jesus nailed to the cross and there nearby is his mother. She is there with Jesus aunt Mary wife of Cleopas and Mary Magdalene.
We do not know to what extent she understood the mystery that was playing out before her and humanity. Her dying son would conquer sin and death!
Mary no doubt had many things going through her mind. We are reminded that it was she that carried the incarnate Son of God in her womb. No one could understand the profound and mysteriou nature of this miracle more than Mary.
Mary helped potty train the toddler Jesus, she dressed him, wiped his nose, comforted him. Then there was the twelve year old Jesus in the temple teaching the elders. Mary also was there for his first miracle at the wedding in Cana, turning water into wine.
"Woman what have you to do with me?" Jesus had once said to Mary.
Jesus grew to know his mission and that mission took him outside the bounds of mother and son.
So little by little the surrenders came between mother and son, as Jesus began his ministry until they looked at each other on Golgotha.
Here we have the scandal that makes even some self-declared Christians squimish, it makes us stumble.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
18For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards,c not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
Mary understood, she got it right!
Are you right now losing your life to find it? Not what our sinful world teaches us is it?
Mary was in complete surrender to Jesus, her life she understood was made for Christ, to serve. Mary the mother of sorrows and hope!
Do we get that?
Come follow me Jesus says even now as He Sits at the Right Hand of God the Father!
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