Mary's Song - JJ Heller

I love songs about Mary. Somehow, it's really easy for me to disregard her in the whole of the biblical story. When I find a song or a writing depicting the crucifiction tale from Mary's point of view, it becomes new to me all over again. Not the story itself, that remains ever the same. But the realness, the pain and the complete and utter despair all becomes poignantly clear.

"Forgive me if I can't stand to watch you suffering - the weight of the world suspended from iron. Oh, Jesus. The Lamb of God, my little boy. Forgive me if I am not ready to bury my son."

When Christ died, he was not just God dying for our sins. He was not just a man taking a world of evil upon himself. He was all those things, but I think it's easy to see him as only that - something otherwordly and untouchable. It's easier to think of him that way because then we have an excuse for why we can't live up to his example.
Sure, we, as Christians, profess that Jesus was both God and perfect man, sent to save us and set us an example of what could be possible. Personally, I tend to focus more on the 'Jesus is God' part of that profession - it saves me from any accountability for the very un-Christ-like parts of my life.
But this song - this lament from a mother forced to watch her son die - reminds me that Jesus was, in fact, very much like me. He had siblings, friends, family. He had a mother whose every instinct would have been to protect him, but who also knew that her fate was to ignore that maternity and instead stand by while her child was beaten, scorned, tortured and killed.
She knew it was for a greater cause, but somehow I'm sure that did nothing to ease her sense of righteous rage at those who would hurt her baby, her helplessness at her inability to stop them or the fact that she had to go through one of the most unnatural experiences on earth in burying her own son. I don't care what time period you live in, the death of a child is never OK.
The song begins:

"I still remember your favorite games; the way that your laughter filled our home. Now you're a naked man on a splintered cross. What have we done to you, oh, Lord?"

Seeing in my own mind that mother's memory of her precious boy deteriorate into her scathing pain at losing him makes all too real to me the fact that Jesus was a person. More than that, though, this song and other songs of Mary remind me that Mary was a person too. It's easy to gloss over her role in the story. Yes, she birthed the son of God and later wept at his cross. It's so easy to say and not think about. She was a young teenager asked to bear the burden of carrying a child that was not her soon-to-be husband's; of being the "ruined" woman in the eyes of most of those she cared about. And what baffles me when I stop to truly think about it is that she was asked to carry this burden - and she said yes. What faith!
From there, she did not just pop him out and say "There you go, God. My job's done." No, she mothered the song of God. She raised him, loved him until the end of his earthly life and beyond. She did what she had to to bring him into this world and then could do nothing but watch as he left it.
What an extraordinary woman this Mary was.