When Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple as a baby, one of the people who prophesied about him turned to Mary and said that a sword would pierce her soul. By the time she had been through the various traumas associated with bringing him up, lost her husband and had to let Jesus get on with a lifestyle that looked like just the workload would kill him, she probably thought the there had been enough of a sword gone into her. However, that wasn't the main meaning of the prophecy. It was probably in the autumn of 32 AD when Jesus left the family home in Capernaum and set out for Jerusalem, where there was already a plot in place to kill him.
We don't know when his mother undertook the journey to the capital herself, whether she went along with Jesus' core team of 12 apostles and the associated women, or if she made her way later. However, by the time he had been arrested and was on trial, she was definitely in Jerusalem. She would presumably have witnessed the crowd clamouring for Jesus' death while the Governor, Pontius Pilate, tried desperately, but in vain, to release this innocent man. She certainly was at Golgotha when her son was crucified, and stayed there with him until he died, along with several other women and one of the apostles. She would have seen Jesus being nailed to the cross and the darkness come over the land for the last three hours of his life, heard him forgive his executioners, heard him forgive one of the thieves who were crucified with him, heard his heart-rending cry when he was abandon by the rest of the Godhead at his lowest time physically, and heard the final groan as he died. She would have then experienced the earthquake that accompanied Jesus's death, followed by the silence of despair as she, along with all his other followers, were left with having to make sense of the fact that the one who clearly going to be the saviour of the world - and her own son - had just been rushed through an unfair trial and subjected to the agonizing, slow death of a criminal. I don't know if anyone can really understand exactly how she must have been feeling at that point.
Jesus had known that she would need support and so, even while dying on the cross, had asked the one disciple who had stuck with him to the end to take her into his household and be a son to her. Mary must have thought that that was it: Jesus was dead and she was going to have to make sense of her now meaningless life as t second mother to one of her son's friends. She had devoted her life to bringing up the Messiah, and he had died without finishing his mission - how could that be? Certainly the thing about the sword and her soul had been right though, so somehow God had understood this in advance. What was that all about?
If you know the end of the story, of course, Jesus came alive again. Some of the women went to the tomb where his body had been laid, to prepare it for burial, but he wasn't there, because he had risen from the dead. It seems that Jesus' mother couldn't bring herself to go along with them, but left it to the other women. I think that we can all understand that. Yet, alive he was, and it wouldn't have taken long for Mary to find out. Again, fully understanding how she could take all this in is probably beyond most of us. We do know, however, that she became one of the faithful followers of Jesus who waited for the arrival of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem and then became the core founders of the Church.
Mary's life went through ups and downs like that of few others, but in the end God trumped all that had come against her and her son. The world had been changed forever, and Mary had been right at the centre of the events that brought that about. Let us not overstate her position, but let us also never sideline her. She is not the mother of God, as if to suggest that God needs a mother, but she was the mother of the man who was also God. She was chosen for that position because she had been faithful to her maker, and she continued to be so through thick and thin, right to the end. She may have started out as an ordinary girl, but she became a remarkable woman.
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