All these works of art imagine the first Good Friday. They capture the range of emotions that Christians feel on this dark day, allowing us to place ourselves in the person of Mary who mourned her dead child. There is surely no grief more profound than the grief parents feel at the death of a child. It is unnatural for the younger to die before the older. The profound grief of the mother of Jesus models for believers a response to the unnatural death of this one whom they also love.

None of the Gospels, however, suggests that Mary carried the crucified body of Jesus. According to all four Gospels, Joseph of Arimathea is given permission by Pilate to bury Jesus, and he puts the body in a secure tomb (Matt. 27:57–60, Mark 15:42–47, Luke 23:50–55, John 19:38–42). To care for the dead was an important religious observance, as John’s Gospel tells us (John 19:31), and as archaeology and other Jewish literature of the period confirm (3). Joseph, a respected Jewish leader, a good and righteous man, undertakes this religious duty for the crucified Jesus (Mark 15:43 and Luke 23:50). There are, of course, paintings of Joseph, but he does not hold the place in our imaginations that Mary holds.

According to the first three Gospels, this Mary isn’t even present when Joseph takes Jesus down from the cross. Matthew tells us that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, a woman without any particular pedigree, watched Joseph put Jesus in the tomb, sitting opposite it (Matt. 27:61). Mark gives us some information about the other Mary—she is the mother of Joses (Mark 15:47). Luke says that the women who watched Joseph were the ones who had followed Jesus from Galilee, and later he identifies these women as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and some unnamed others (Luke 23:55 and 24:10). And in John’s Gospel, it is Nicodemus who helps Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus, not Mary, the mother of Jesus (John 19:39).

This image of a grieving mother that has so captured the Christian imagination does, however, have roots in the Gospel of John. In all four Gospels, there are women watching at the crucifixion (Matt. 27:55–56, Mark 15:40–41, Luke 23:49, and John 19:25), but only in John’s Gospel do we observe the mother of Jesus among those women. John tells us that just before Jesus dies, as his final action, he commends the care of his beloved disciple to his mother and the care of his mother to his beloved disciple (John 19:26–27). Tradition has identified the beloved disciple as John, but in the gospel account, neither John nor Mary are named. Rather, both are identified by their relation to Jesus: she is called his mother, and he is called the disciple whom Jesus loved. It is this story that gives rise to the images of a mother grieving for her son and to John’s presence with her at the cross.

In John’s Gospel, Mary’s identity is both less definite and more important than in the other Gospels. On the one hand, we never learn her name in this gospel. When we read of her presence among the vigilant women at the foot of the cross and when Jesus commends her to John, her particular identity is obscured, as if her identity has been absorbed into her role as mother of the crucified one. She is not made present in this crucifixion narrative as a particular Mary—whom we would need to distinguish from other women of that name—but as the woman who brought into the world the one who is now leaving the world.

We also do not meet Mary in this gospel as a woman with a baby. Instead, we first meet her as a woman enmeshed in family and community with a grown son. She is attending a wedding in the town of Cana in the region of Galilee (John 2:1–11). Jesus and the disciples whom he had gathered before the wedding are there with her. The caterer has run out of wine, so the mother of Jesus asks him to help. Jesus puts her off—it is not the right time for him to host a wedding banquet. But she insists, and eventually Jesus complies. He turns the water in six large jars—each holding twenty or thirty gallons—into good wine, and the wedding celebration continues in style. Throughout this account, Mary is called “the mother of Jesus” or less intimately, “Woman.” We do not learn her name.

The third explicit mention of her in the gospel is when Jesus’s opponents complain about Jesus’s claim that he is the bread from heaven (John 6:41–42). They argue that they know his parents, so, clearly, Jesus has not come from heaven. They dismiss him with the words: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (NRSV). Even here, Joseph is named, but Mary is not. In whatever way Jesus’s mother matters for this gospel, her particular identity is obscured.

On the other hand, the miracle at the wedding of Cana is the first sign of Jesus’s glory. His mother’s insistence that he contribute wine for the feast leads to Jesus’s first act in his public ministry. And the commendation of John to Mary and vice versa is Jesus’s last act before his death. Jesus’s mother is clearly very important to John’s story. She bookends his public ministry, invoking its beginning with her expectation that he will act on behalf of the wedding party and entering into a new relationship with the unnamed disciple at its end.

This is a very different portrait from what we find in Luke’s writings, where Mary also has a significant role. When we encounter Mary in Luke’s Gospel, we meet a young woman whose life is being interrupted by an angel. The angel asks her to join God in God’s redemptive purposes for the world. And she gives her consent. This is a comfortable image, even if it is also benevolently patriarchal. God, the higher being, comes to Mary, the lesser being, to ask her to do what only a woman can do: bear the child who will save the world. And Mary, having been given the grace to participate in the purposes of God, assents to God’s plan. As a result, she has a singular vocation as the mother of God in the history of salvation. She is Mary, the one that all generations will call blessed (Luke 1:48).

Her singular identity, derived from her particular role, is softened somewhat later in Luke’s Gospel when a woman in the crowd following Jesus suggests that Mary is particularly blessed for having born and nursed him. Jesus responds that those are blessed who hear the word of God and obey it (Luke 11:27–28). In fact, Mary is both blessed by the woman from the crowd for her unique role and blessed by Jesus for the way this unique role models an obedient response to God. In Acts, which is also believed to be the work of Luke, we find Mary praying in the upper room, a disciple among disciples, waiting for the promised Holy Spirit who would empower them all for mission (Acts 1:14). But even here, she is named.

John’s Gospel starts in a different way. He announces that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Word was active in the creation of all things and became human and joined our community, shining in our darkness. There is no thought here of a woman contributing to the grand purposes of God. There is a man sent from God to witness to the light, but that man is John the Baptist. God is active accomplishing God’s purposes in God’s own way, with no mention of Mary. Neither does the ending of John’s Gospel mention her. Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, Thomas the Twin, Nathanael of Cana, the sons of Zebedee, two others of the disciples, and the disciple whom Jesus loved all see and converse with the resurrected Jesus, but Mary is not a part of his resurrection ministry.

So how is it that, despite the evidence of the Gospels, the image of the grieving mother has so captured our imaginations? Have I drawn an entirely faithful picture of her role in John’s Gospel?

Something else needs to be said. I believe that Mary captures our imaginations because we can believe she is like us. It was her catering problem that provided the impetus for Jesus’s public ministry. It was her loss of a son that Jesus responded to at the end of his earthly life. The �ʾ����à invites us to join her in her grief because we can believe that we grieve as she grieved. In these stories about Jesus’s mother in John’s Gospel, we are not invited to participate in God’s story—that is Luke’s invitation—instead, we see that God comes to participate in our story. When her friends need more wine, their need is met and there is an abundance of good wine. In her grief at the death of her child, she is given one who will care for her. It is easy to read our lives into the life of this unnamed one who is so like us, who calls on her son to create abundant life instead of scarcity and who was so cared for by him in her sorrow. We are grateful to know that our needs and our sorrows are sufficient invitation for God to come near.

In his Farewell Discourse, as he anticipated his death and separation from his disciples, Jesus comforted them with an image of a woman giving birth (John 16:20–22) (4). He reminded them that in the hour of a woman’s labor, she has pain and anguish, just like the disciples are experiencing as they anticipate Jesus’s absence. But when the birth has been accomplished, the woman forgets the pain because of her joy in the new life of the person born. As Jesus leaves his earthly life, attending to the grief of his mother, he dies as one anticipating vindication, as a woman in labor who anticipates the joy of new life. His teaching is embodied by his mother.

And so his mother becomes not only the one with whom we identify in sorrow but also a model of hope for life and joy beyond sorrow. Mary becomes an archetype for all of us in our need and in our afflictions, and even more, as mother, in our hope for new life. If one must be born from above to enter the kingdom of God, as Jesus said to Nicodemus, the mother of Jesus guides us through that birthing process, standing at the foot of the cross (John 3:7). Grace and truth, and glory, become present like wine at Cana (John 1:14). The deep sadness of losing a child becomes the foundation for new relationships. At the point of great suffering, Jesus responds to her overwhelming loss.

To say it another way, in John’s Gospel, it is our need that evokes God’s action. And God’s action is for abundant life—even death on a cross. We grieve with his mother, and we are comforted because Jesus comforted her. By speaking of this woman as Jesus’s mother rather than identifying her as a particular woman, John calls us into an intimate relationship with God, into an affiliation that we also can inhabit because of our own need. This is in contrast to Luke, where Mary is presented as fulfilling a unique role in God’s plan of salvation, a role that does not need repetition. In this way, the mother of Jesus teaches us what to do with Holy Friday. She allows us to dwell in the grief of the world as God-bearers, watching as the light of the world is extinguished. As children of light we experience the scarcity of our existence and long for abundance. She teaches us to weep and to pray. And we know that our grief is enough because, in our tears and our prayers, we are as the woman who gave birth, the woman to whom God responded with wine and companionship. We too anticipate joy because we are confident that our tears and sorrow enjoin light and life to come to us.

This post was originally published at .

1. Timothy Verdon, Mary in Western Art, captions by Filippo Rossi (New York, NY: Hudson Hills, 2005), 140–64.
2. Michelangelo Buonarroti, �ʾ����à, c. 1498-1500, marble sculpture, ; Giovanni Bellini, �ʾ����à Martinengo, c. 1505, oil on panel,; Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation of Christ, c. 1480, tempera on canvas, ; Sandro Botticelli, Lamentation over the Dead Christ with Saints, c. 1490–1495, tempera on panel, ; Enguerrand Quarton, �ʾ����à of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, c. 1460–1470, oil on wood, .
3. See Byron R. McCane, “Burial Practices in First Century Palestine,” Bible Odyssey, .
4. Judith Lieu helpfully brings this passage into the discussion of Mary in the Gospel of John in “The Mother of the Son in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117 (1998): 61–77, especially 70–74.

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Most of us are creatures of habit. When we come into a classroom or a church service, we sit in the same place. Most of us have a morning routine that we follow, at least during the work-week. Life is simply more manageable if there are patterns.

We should therefore expect that some of the first words the angel says to Mary will be “Do not be afraid.” An angel’s appearance is surprising, out of the ordinary, not at all routine. Luke tells us that Mary was much perplexed by the angel Gabriel’s greeting, and I can easily believe that; “much perplexed” is probably an understatement. (Luke 1:30)

Often the phrase “do not be afraid” is spoken by a messenger from God when the people of God are in a difficult spot and a word comes to them that God is with them. This is the case when the LORD appears to Hagar, the Egyptian slave girl who had been cast into the desert with her son by a jealous Sarah. She thinks she and her child will die for lack of water. But the angel of God calls to her, “Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy.” (Genesis 21:17) Jacob, the father of the twelve tribes of Israel, hears these words in a vision when he is departing from the land given to his grandfather. He is going to Egypt because there is no food in the land of promise. (Genesis 46:3) These are also God’s reassuring words to Jeremiah and Ezekiel as the prophets anticipate push-back from a people who will not want to hear their words of judgement. (Jeremiah 1:8 and Ezekiel 2:6)

But occasionally the phrase comes when God announces that something out of the ordinary is about to happen. An angel of the LORD appears out of the blue (pardon the pun) and announces the unusual: “Do not be afraid, God is about to do something entirely unexpected.” “Do not be afraid, Abram, old man with no child, you will have so many descendants that you will not be able to count them.” (Genesis. 15:1) “Do not be afraid, my chosen people exiled to a foreign land, I will pour out my spirit on your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring.” (Isaiah 44:1-8) “Do not be afraid, virgin, you will bear a son whose kingdom will not end.” (Luke 1:30-33)

If we listen, scripture shapes our image of God. By these four words, we are taught to believe that God will come to us, to save us, when we are in a difficult spot. We need not fear because God cares for us. Our God is this sort of God—a God who saves. But we are also taught to understand that our salvation may not come in a way that we were anticipating. Our God is also this sort of God—a God of surprising actions.

“If we listen, scripture shapes our image of God. By these four words, we are taught to believe that God will come to us, to save us, when we are in a difficult spot.”

And these two truths help us live with hope. With Hagar we hope for water in the desert. With Jacob we hope for a future in foreign territory. With Jeremiah and Ezekiel, we hope for defense when we stand for the truth God has made known to us. But we also need to hope remembering that God’s purposes might be fulfilled in an unexpected way. Old men are given descendants. Displaced people are given God’s Spirit. A virgin bears a child who saves the world. In this way, listening to the words of scripture also shapes us so that we are conformed to the image of God’s Son. We learn to hope for life, for life is also the desire of God, and we learn to be open to the appearance of life in surprising ways, sometimes with great personal cost. Who expected that a death on a Roman cross would enable life for the world?

2018 was a hard year to be a Christian. People who claim Christian faith act for power rather than life. There are millions of people all over the world displaced by wars, famine, and natural disasters who have nowhere to go. Nations think that they have exhausted their capacity for hospitality to strangers. There is a heightened rhetoric of hate and intolerance. Long-standing, buried prejudices are openly displayed. Destruction because of the damage we have inflicted on the creation is obvious everywhere. Human life is unmanageable, out of control. We join Isaiah in lament and prayer: We have long been like those whom you do not rule, like those not called by your name. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. (Isaiah 63:19-64:1) We can only hope for a different world in 2019—hope for the coming down of the LORD.

“We learn to hope for life, for life is also the desire of God, and we learn to be open to the appearance of life in surprising ways, sometimes with great personal cost.”

Advent is a time of hope. It is a time when we remind ourselves of God’s eternal commitment to life and we open ourselves to new visions of the ways of God. It is a time when we are called to prepare to participate in God’s work, to make watching for God part of our habit.

But God does not always work in predictable ways. God will be God. Advent preparation also includes adjusting our expectations of how God will come because we remember the surprising way in which God did come: to a virgin, as a child. Advent is not for the faint of heart.

The call of Advent is to respond to God as Mary did: “Here I am, a virgin and servant of the Lord. I can bear this child, let me be participate in your purposes, according to your word.” It is to hear the voice of the angel, “Do not fear.”

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The metaphor captured the strong sense I have had from the early days of my tenure at ������Ƶ that I had been called to this work—but also ‘lent’ by a different library. My Canadian heritage made me distinct, even though I looked the same and (except for a few words) spoke the same language.

The metaphor also worked in the sense that I had that I was a resource for many projects—of students and of the institution as a whole.

Often I felt like I spoke for the goodness and the breadth of the Christian tradition to people who mostly knew a narrow, debilitating form of that tradition. The goodness of God and the richness of the intellectual and spiritual legacy of two millennia of Christian thought and practice always seemed like an enormous open space to me, inviting and nourishing, and I was glad to share my perspective.

But if you have requested an inter-library loan book, it is because you do not have this volume in your library, and there was a certain sense that as long as I stayed, the school could rely on someone else’s book. Eventually I realized that the school had built up its own collection, opening its own spaces. I felt free to move on.

I entered into a conversation with leadership at Ambrose University that helped me to see that all my gifts could be used in this new location. I could step into a new role as dean, taking all I had learned during my experiences as professor at ������Ƶ at a time when I was able to help it build up its own collection. This opened up the possibility that I could move home to the Canadian prairies for this last season of my work before I am ‘weeded’ from the library—to push the metaphor a bit too far.

The great gift of ������Ƶ to me is a strong sense that I contribute to an academic institution not just with what I do, but also by who I am. I now live more consciously in the awareness that God smiles on me like a friend who welcomes me to participate in the work of grace that is God’s constant gift to us. Or perhaps God smiles most like a doting parent, sometimes with pride and sometimes with a shaking of the head—but always glad for the ways I have grown into a more mature ‘volume.’

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