I do not think she cared to watch His death;
to see Him struggle for that final breath;
nor, at the end like othwr men do, die---
with her, His Mother, helpless, standing by.
She raised Him in the town of Nazareth,
far from the larger Roman world's armed strife.
He learned at his stepfather's kindly knee
the art of farm repair with carpentry
among the fertile farms of Galilee.
During the three years of His Ministrry,
He preached His Good News---a New Way of Life.
I took her to my home, a little way
off---mine, left to me by inheritance.
As we walked that meandering diirection,
she said, "Before the dawn of the first day
"after the Sabbath, my Son's Resurrection
"will conquer death, and all of sorrow's pain."
Some might have thought the statement was insane.
But you should have seen her bright countenance.
Starward
[*/+/^]
Author's Notes/Comments:
The early Christians of AD 90 or after believed that Jesus' stepfather, Joseph, was not a carpenter that built things as much as repaired them. They believed Joseph had a route around the many (and several quite large) farms in Galilee (some owned by absentee Romans who hired managers to operate the farms), to repair yokes, plows, wheels, and various impliments. As a young person, I often wondered why Jesus spoke so much, in His parables and elsewhere, about farms, vineyards, barns, plows, yokes, etc., and very little about levels, saws, hammers, nails, and building furniture or hanging doors or that sort. Also, Jesus' apparent love for travel, and the circular pattern of his Ministry, may have been influenced by His stepfather's business routes. Given that Jesus came to restore, repair, redeem, and otherwise fix the ruin of this world, His early apprenticeship in and practice of repair carpentry on the farms makes a lot of spiritual sense.
John 19 indicates that the Beloved Disciple had a home in Jerusalem, to which he took Mary, the Mother of Jesus, during the crucifixion. John's Gospel clearly suggests that she was not present in the last moments of Her Son's life. Jim Bishop's magnificent book, The Day Christ Died (which I first read at the age of twelve years old, long before I had any real faith) gives a very poignant explanation of this part of Good Friday. Furthermore, that John took her to be his own mother, as the Gospel states, suggests that his mother was already deceased; for Jesus, in the agony of the cross, would never have severed a son's relationship with his birth mother in order to make room for His own mother. Since, from this request we can assume safely that John's own mother was dead, the Salome mentioned as being present both at the Cross and at the Tomb, in Mark 15 and 16, cannot be, as some scholars assume without proof, the mother of John and James. (Consider, Mark places Salome at the Cross, where John and Mary are also, prior to Jesus' request for John to take Mary as his own mother. If Salome were John's mother, the awkwardness and sheer cruelty of this alteration in relationships is totally and utterly inconsistent with Jesus' Personality and Mission.) Rather, the assigment of Jesus' mother to John's care, removes John from any maternal relationship with Salome. Therefore, I suggest on this basis, that Salome, in Mark's Gospel, is the dancing girl of Mark 6 who was cajoled or tricked into asking for the head, and therefore the death, of John the Baptist.
