April 21st, 2011 by Kristi Stephens

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Tuesday we began our Easter-week journey with Mary Magdalene asking, “what’s your story?” Yesterday we asked, “what will you give him?”

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying,  “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.”  And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.  When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

There were also many women there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

Matthew 27:45-56 (ESV)

It always strikes me that after everyone else scattered, these women stayed close to the cross.

They had watched their Savior and Lord – their friend – wrongly accused, beaten until He barely resembled Himself, forced to carry the heavy cross on which He would be killed. They had walked behind Him through jeering, screaming, hateful crowds. They had followed at a distance and found themselves watching a nightmare in real life – Jesus, their Jesus, nailed to a cross and left to die while Roman soldiers and even their fellow Jews mocked Him with hearts seething with hatred.

They stayed there as the sky grew ominously black, while Jesus suffered and cried out in spiritual and physical agony. They saw His head drop in death. They felt the earth shake and saw the rocks splitting. And as the soldiers cried out in fear that Jesus truly was the Son of God, they must have wept uncontrollable tears – for they had already known that to be true. And now… He was gone.

Mary’s whole life was Jesus. He had rescued her from the hellishness of her past, she had dedicated everything in her present to serving Him. As she watched Him die, what was she thinking about? As awful as it must have been, we know that she stayed – Matthew 27:59-61 tells us that Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” were present when Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus’ broken body in the tomb and sealed the entrance with the stone. I wonder what it was like to walk back home? To think that the One you believed would change the world, the One who you thought was the Promised Messiah who would make everything right again, was lying dead in a tomb never to live again? I imagine there were no sounds but the soft thuds of their footsteps on the dirt path as they walked back to where they were staying. Surely the question in their minds was “What now?”

It makes me wonder… would I have stayed?

I can’t even watch The Passion of the Christ all the way through. How often do I skip through the suffering of Jesus and get to the good part of the resurrection? The suffering is hard. The suffering is ugly. The suffering exposes the ugliness of my sin – it exposes what I deserve. The suffering… was because of my sin.

As Paul Miller states in this post, we have a distaste for the cross. This week, may God capture our hearts not just with the hope of the resurrection, but also with the power of the cross. Don’t skip through it – stay at the cross with Mary.