A sword

It's Easter this weekend, and I was thinking about images of Mary, either standing at the foot of the cross or holding the dead body of her son, like Michelangelo's Pietà:

It's hard to imagine Mary's pain. Never mind that this was God's son, foretold by the prophets: this is her son, whom she carried and nursed and bathed and worried over. And it can't have made it any easier that she'd been warned about this pain three decades earlier.

In Luke's gospel, just at the end of the Christmas story, there's the account of Mary and Joseph taking the forty-one day old Jesus to the Temple, as required by the Law. They meet Simeon, who takes Jesus and praises God; he then blesses the parents and tells Mary three things.

He says that Jesus is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, to be a sign that will be spoken against so that the thoughts of many will be revealed, and that a sword will pierce Mary's heart too. What a description of how it must feel to hold the dead body of your child: as if a solid piece of metal has been shoved into your chest and gone all the way through your heart.

But Simeon doesn't just prophesy pain for Mary. He looks ahead to the upheaval that is to come in the whole of society. During Jesus' lifetime He had met opposition: respected members of society had argued with Him and criticised Him, and He'd made people so angry they wanted to stone Him to death. Twenty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, Paul said that preaching a crucified Christ seemed to some people to be foolishness and a stumbling block. And the arguments and upheaval are still going on: all around the world, in books and magazines and on social media, Jesus is still a sign that is spoken against, that reveals the thoughts of many.

Right now it's Easter Eve (called Holy Saturday in some traditions), the time of waiting in between the remembrance of the crucifixion and the celebration of the resurrection. There are millions of people who have heard and rejected the message of Jesus, and millions more who have never heard it at all. It's tempting to want to give an easy message: God loves you, all you have to do is to come to Him. That's true, but that's not the whole story. The message of Jesus is hard: people will object to it or laugh at it; the good news of the resurrection also includes the suffering of the cross. The promise of life comes with a warning that a sword might pierce your heart too.