Mary, the Wife of Clopas

We were there…people often forget it but we were there.

Later they said that all his followers had run away. That he had been left alone – quite alone; that everybody had left him.

‘Everyone?’ I would ask.

‘Yes, all of us’ Peter would say. ‘We’re all as bad as each other. We all left him. We all fled’.

‘All of us?’

‘Yes, all of us. Every last …oh’.

It often took him a while but most of the time he would get there in the end – until he forgot again.

‘Not everyone’.

‘Exactly’, I would say, ‘not…everyone’.

You see, we were there, Mary Magdalene and I. Obviously not in the Garden of Gethsemane: Jesus had gone ahead with the twelve by himself. But the moment we heard what had happened, we followed him. Just like we did in happier times when we first heard his teaching. That’s always been what I’ve done – when disaster strikes and I don’t know what to do, I do what I normally do -- day in day out -- until I do know what to do. So at the awful moment when it felt as though the world was collapsing around him, we did what we had been doing for the past few years, we followed him. We followed him to Caiaphas’ house and shivered through the long dark hours in the courtyard; we followed him to Pilate’s house and listened with horror while the crowd cried out ‘crucify, crucify’ all around us. We followed him to Herod’s house and back again. And then we followed him to a place we never imagined we’d go – to his crucifixion.

At some point during the long miserable wait Mary Magdalene slipped away and came back with his mother, Mary. And we stood there on that cold, wretched hill watching as all our hopes and dreams died before our eyes. I’d got to know Jesus’ mother well over the past few years. We had spent long hours together mostly talking about him: the amazing events that happened when he was born; when he got lost in the temple on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem; Mary’s shame, at first, when he started travelling around and teaching but then, after pondering it all, how she came to understand. She would often talk about what Simeon had said to her when she’d taken Jesus to the temple as a baby – he’d spoken about Jesus and who he would became, the outrage he would cause and how he would reveal who people really were. That was certainly true - I’d seen it in so many of the people that he met. I’d noticed it in myself. Simeon had been right. We’d talked about it more than once. He had described exactly the effect that Jesus would have on people.

It was the last thing Simeon had said that Mary puzzled over. Apparently he’d turned to her at the end, looked at her with an expression that surprised her and said that a sword would pierce her soul too. She’d wondered over the years what he’d meant. Perhaps he’d meant that awful moment when she’d thought Jesus was lost in Jerusalem. Perhaps he’d meant the pain of him leaving home, the desperate loss of her beloved first born son. Perhaps he’d meant the embarrassment she’d felt when she’d first heard that he had started teaching people without ever having studied with a Rabbi first. Was that what he’d meant? As I stood there that day and looked at Mary then, I imagined that all those things felt like nothing more than pin pricks to the soul now. Later on I discovered that she’d been thinking exactly the same thing. As we were holding on to each other in our grief in a simple effort to stay upright, I heard her whispering to herself: ‘So this is what he meant’.

At some point during that long, lonely vigil – the beloved disciple appeared quietly by our side. I don’t know when he got there. That was just like him. Never with a fanfare. Never drawing attention to himself. Never forcing himself into situations. I suspect that was what Jesus appreciated about him – his company was gentle, undemanding, easy. When so many people wanted so much from Jesus all of the time, he didn’t. He was just there. He was one of those people you felt better simply because they were there. From the cross Jesus noticed him, at almost the same time we did. He had said nothing during that long agonising time but right then he spoke: ‘Here is your son’ he said and, ‘Here is your mother’. Looking at one and then the other of them. Then he just looked at Mary. A look of pure love. It broke my heart and he wasn’t even my son.

A few moments later he asked for a drink and sighed ‘It is finished’ – then it was. Everything was over. Everything bar the heart-break. We just stood there for what felt like hours. Numb and shocked.

Then we did what we’d always done – we followed him. Some men we didn’t know took his body off the cross – and we followed them. They took him to a tomb nearby – so we followed them. We watched as they buried him – they didn’t anoint him or use spices they were in too much of a rush before sun-down. We couldn’t do anything the next day – it was the Sabbath – but we thought we’d come back early on Sunday morning, before anyone else was up. We could anoint him then. We didn’t think it through. We had no plan about how we’d roll the stone away. The whole task was a man’s job really but they’d run away and it was just us, so we were doing what we’d always done – following him.

We were there…people often forget it but we were there.