It is telling that Mother’s Day is the busiest phone day in the United States, with some 122 million calls going out to the ones who brought us all into the world. Back in the day when party lines were shared, loved ones waited all day for their call to go through. Even then, party lines cut conversations in half by the next person waiting in line. While Mother’s Day isn’t the busiest holiday of the year, it’s not a day you want to forget.
I did that once in college, but a quick call from my father corrected that.
It is not within our humanly power to fully appreciate the sacrifices mother’s make for their children’s lives. I was blessed to have a smart, conscientious, dedicated mom, and those good traits were just the tip of her rich character. She was not perfect, and she made mistakes, but often those mistakes were born out of trying to protect and guide me and were not born from her resentment or bitterness. That women have the gift for providing the gentle blanket of empathy and caretaking over their children is a rock-solid truth of life. My mom had that gift also.
Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, was part of the female entourage that accompanied Jesus and his twelve disciples on his ministry during the three years before his crucifixion. In those days, it was common for the women to fetch water for that day’s chores, a task too culturally “low” to ask of men. Mary Magdalene and Jesus’ mother were up before dawn after Jesus died, probably on their way to get water and to care for Jesus’ body (Matthew 18:1), when Mary noticed that his tomb was empty.
Only a mother can imagine the grief and sorrow the mother of Jesus felt as she began her day attending to the simple chores required of her; get water and check on the body of Jesus in the tomb. She probably would rather have gone back to bed and drowned in her sorrow there, but she rose and began her day. Christians would call that faith, and Jesus called it that, too. When we are given the simple job of believing in something, our acts of faith are in the hope of what we cannot see. It is there in those moments, that God redefines us with the grace of his presence. It was also in their act of faith, that Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” went to the tomb and were met by Jesus, the Risen Christ.
Then, He says to us: “Why are you crying?”
Given the horrible death of Jesus on the Cross, I am reminded that in the worst of times, it was a woman who found the courage to move forward and find the miracle along the way, the resurrected Christ standing beside her. It is a moment that all Christianity hangs upon. We lean on our faith, and the faith of Mary, to put one foot in front of the other as she did, to go and fetch water, and find our own miracle in that faith journey.
Mothers help us do that. When all seems lost, mothers find their way through a tomb of darkness. They help us rest and look over our shoulders to the One who has been there all along. They rise before dawn. Then, they bring us a cup of hot tea to heal our wounds with the faith that our problems will be solved in time, and that we will find strength and hope along our own path.