Doubting Doubt
(Table of Contents - Click This Link)
The Process
Step 3 – He is Beside Himself (cont.)
What About Mary?
* Who's Got What It Takes?
My second approach:
The question was, “What about Mary?”
The case that I have been making is that for us to say that she thought
that Jesus was crazy is less plausible than to say that she didn’t. This takes us way back to something that you
might have thought I had forgotten about:
the women; those women who were at the crucifixion and who went to the
tomb.
My
position then was that we had established fairly indisputably that those women
possessed faith and loyalty and devotion that was absolutely unwavering,
unflinching and unfailing.
Are we to understand that Mary had less faith and devotion than
they? The account given of the women who
went to the tomb does not say that Mary, Jesus’ mother, was with them. Neither does it say that she was not with
them. However, we can understand that in
their day, like in our own, the grieving mother would not be expected to have
to endure all the details associated with the death of her son.
In
fact, according to the book, The Jewish
People in the First Century, there were many customs and practices that
were expected, if not required, of a grieving mother, customs dealing with the
duration of home-stay for ceremonial purification as well as for mourning,
customs regulating visitors, customs regulating things they were allowed to do,
and much more.[1]
Mary, in all likelihood, did not go to the tomb along with the other
women in the story, but it was not because she had less faith than the other
women. More than that, remember that in
Mark 15:40 we are told that there were women standing at a distance at the
crucifixion, and we are given some of their names: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the
younger and of Joseph and Salome. And it
says that many other women were there as well.
They might have been at a distance, but at least they were there. Not the men.
The men were nowhere around.
But what about Mary, the mother of Jesus? Was she there? It would seem that at that time at least, she
was not there. But even if it could be
said for a fact that she was not there at that time, she was not a deserter and
she was there before it was all over. In
John 19:25 there she is right at the cross, along with at least three other
women and the apostle John. So, just as
we said about the other women, she was there right to the end. It seems to verge on absurdity to think that
the other women had enduring faith but not Jesus’ own mother.
Does Mary’s presence at the cross sound like someone who doubted
Jesus? Pastor X said that Mary did not
understand fully until after the resurrection.
I don’t know what he means by “understand fully.” I think the whole church was struggling to
understand fully for the first 300 or 400 years of its existence. In fact, it seems we were still coming to
grips with the Word of God up through the 16th and 17th centuries
and probably there are areas that we still are struggling to fully understand
today. More than that, I don’t think any
of us will ever fully understand until we come before His presence. But when we read that Mary was at the foot of
the cross before Jesus died, we can show good reason to think that she was not
there as a scoffer.
“Well,” someone will say, “her doubts were earlier. She got over it.” (Someone once actually suggested this
ridiculous notion to me.)
So
here is what we are being asked to believe:
Mary gave birth to Jesus through the supernatural power of the Holy
Spirit, she had spoken to angels, she had experienced the worship of Jesus by
shepherds and wise men and she raised a truly perfect and sinless Son, she had
the testimony of Elizabeth and all the rest that we mentioned earlier, plus she
was faithful to the end, but
for a brief time, a period when Jesus was giving sermons and doing miracles and
attracting multitudes of worshipers, during that period of time, Mary not only
doubted Jesus’ identity but she thought He was a lunatic.
Do
you realize how preposterous that sounds?
Do you really believe that and are basing that preposterous claim, with
all of the missing information it involves, on nothing more than that one
phrase in Mark 3:21, which you are probably reading with distorted spectacles?
[1] S. Safrai, author/editor, M. Stern, author/editor, W.C. Van Unnick, editor, D. Flusser, editor, The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions, series Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, (pub. Assen, NL, Royal Van Gorcum 1974, Minneapolis, MN, U.S, Fortress Press 1975), pp. 774-785.
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