On the Cross--He Thought About His Mother

This evening was Easter Eve. 

I had spent half the afternoon making two trips to Falcon with Sam to get an oil filter and auto body clips for our van--and then to go back and get the right kind to replace the mistake. 

Sam is learning. He drove, he looked in the auto parts book, he found the oil filter, he found the clips.

He turned back around after getting home, and went back to town to fix his mistake without any todo.

I had to go along since he doesn't have his driver's license yet.

He came back and finished changing the oil.

He opened the door of the store for his mother when she went in with him, 

and he opened the car door for her when she came back out.

No stars, flags, or whistles--

just simple, thoughtful gestures that made his mother's heart warm.

He's learning.

He's learning to not only fix vehicles and find what he needs in auto parts stores,

but to be kind and thoughtful to his mother.

And yeah, maybe his teeth aren't quite perfect, but he's trying to follow the footsteps

of the One Who looked down from where He was dying there on the cross,

hanging in agony between heaven and earth.

Maybe His teeth were crooked, too, but the only thing that ever came from between them

were words of truth and grace.

He Who hung on the cross could have said, "Pity me! 

Oh pity poor me!"

Instead, He spoke to the mother He had always cared about, and said, 

"Woman, behold Your son!"

And then to John, "Behold, your mother!"

And from that time John took Mary, Jesus' mother, to his own home. 

We read about that this evening as we worshipped around the table this eve before Easter.

We sang, "What Wondrous Love Is This, O My Soul!"

And then we read how Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus took Jesus' body from the cross and laid it in a tomb.

Jonathan had asked me to read, to I was the one reading when I came to where it said,

"There was a garden."

And that's the second place in the reading where I broke down. 

Don't ask me why. 

It just touched me that even our Lord, divine as He was, chose to be buried in a garden.

There's something about a garden--something sacred, something that seems close to the heart of God.

Perhaps that's why I miss having a garden so much.

Is it significant that God chose a garden to be the place where He would first reveal Himself to 

the weeping Mary?

Is it significant that where two angels once sat at the gate to the garden of Eden,

after the first sin,

barring entrance with flaming swords,

now, 4000 years later, two angels sat in an empty tomb, welcoming sinners to 

"Come and see the place where the Lord lay!"

Sin, with its icy grip, had clenched the world in its hopeless fist.

But "Then Came the Morning," as the song says that our church "choir" is practicing to sing tomorrow.

The spear that had pierced our Savior's side

and the thorns that had scratched His brow

and all the sins and griefs that had broken His heart when He died

were triumphed over. 

 Now all our brokenness could be healed.

All the sinful bent could be straightened.

All our stripes could be healed.

"Man of Sorrows, What a name 

For the Son of God Who came,

Ruined sinners to reclaim,

Hallelujah! What a Savior!"

He "suffered without the camp,"

out where the refuse was,

like the piles of horse manure over at our neighbor's,

those piled heaps of dung and trash and ashes and sins and despair. 

And there, there with the cross and the spear and the thorns

redemption happened!

Three days later, hope blossomed anew,

like fresh dandelions near the thorny locust tree in our pasture. 

And God cupped in His hands the sorrowing and despairing mother,

Mary Magdalene, the broken-hearted women who had faithfully followed him and ministered to Him and His disciples,

and all the frightened and troubled disciples.

In those dark days of waiting,

He cupped them in His hands.