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The Women At The Cross

Author
Category Articles
Date February 14, 2006

Some women were watching from a distance,” (v.40) Mark begins, and you might think that these were a group of curious onlookers, horrified by what they saw and so standing at a distance, but still constrained to see what was happening. They were ‘watching’, we are told, and that word is instructive. In several of his sermons our Lord spoke of the value of ‘watching’ – “watch and pray!” – that is, of keen, involved observation. Then Mark gives names to these observers; they were not simply “the crowd” but they were individuals with their own personalities and histories. There was first Mary Magdalene and this is the first time she appears in the gospel. You will know that in every single gospel she is named as the first witness of the resurrected Jesus Christ. To this deeply flawed woman he first appeared when he was raised from the dead. There is no evidence in the New Testament that she was once a whore; that is simply legend. The only reference to her former life is in Luke 8 where we are told that Jesus delivered her from seven demons, but demon possession is never linked with prostitution in the Bible. She could have had physical illness from this evil influence as a number in the New Testament did, fits and wild shrieks; she could have thrown herself into the fire or a river; there might have been an orthopedic condition; she could have been crippled with an illness. We don’t know, but we do know that the Saviour delivered her and afterwards she never left him.

Then there is Mary the mother of two boys. That may be Jesus’ mother because in Mark 6:3 we are told that his mother had two sons named James and Joses. They are, however, popular names for boys and here Mark calls James ‘the younger’ but that is probably to distinguish him from James the brother of John. I would think that this is the mother of Jesus though I do not know why Mark does not so designate her. Here his mother is again, at some distance from him, as she is throughout the gospels. We know that she was certainly at Golgotha because our Lord spoke to her from the cross and commended her to the care of his friend John the disciple.

The third woman is Salome, the most mysterious of the three. Could this be the daughter of Herodias who danced for Herod and was compelled to ask for the head of John the Baptist? What an extraordinary change in her life, from such wealth and degradation to being a devout follower of the Saviour, even coming to the cross and watching him die. Grace accomplishes glorious transformations. Who would have thought that Saul of Tarsus, the inquisitor general, would have become the greatest of all the followers of the Lord Jesus? But we are not told in the Bible that Salome was the name of Herodias’ daughter. This Salome may have been the mother of James and John the sons of Zebedee whom John tells us in his gospel was present at the cross. From our archaeological records of first century Palestine 50 per cent of the women were named either Mary or Salome.

So Mark tells us that there were these three women there, but it is here, just before the gospel ends, that they get a mention for the first time. Then Mark adds, “In Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs.” We would never have guessed this from reading Mark’s gospel; he makes no mention of any female presence. You might have imagined that it was an all-male movement, and then once you read these words then it fits into place. Our Lord helped women, and they came to seek his help and his blessing on their children. A number of them gave their time to humbly serve him. They were present at the crucifixion, the burial and the resurrection. Then Mark adds this, that “Many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem were also there.” We have this glimpse of the support structure of the ministry of Jesus, the people who washed and prepared food for the band of apostles and disciples, getting water from the wells, clearing up and serving in other ways, speaking to other women and children and men who came shyly with their questions, always ready to give an answer for the reason for their hope in Jesus. They were regular members of the group which Mark refers to as ‘Jesus and his disciples.’ They were not simply the cleaners and the cooks but they were disciples, and they followed him right to the end. There was this female element in Jesus’ entourage and they were with him on Golgotha. They located where the tomb was and so they weren’t mistaken when they went to that particular graveyard on the first day of the week. Mark doesn’t tell us that they assisted the men in taking Jesus’ corpse down from the cross, cleaning and clothing it with the grave clothes but it is perfectly reasonable to think of their activity in that manner.

They are the eyewitnesses of the world. If this were a wonderful fiction then you would have had men being with Christ at the cross and men being the first to see him rise from the dead. Women were regarded as worthless witnesses in the world of Jesus’ day; they were never called upon to give evidence in court. But Mark doesn’t apologise for the fact that women were eyewitnesses of the central facts of the Christian gospel. They were with him when he died as they had been when he lived. They helped in his burial and were the first to see him rise from the dead. Paul says about weak men and women that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty. The last, in the eyes of the first century, became the first, and the first were the last. This is the beginning of a new chapter in the blessings God gives to women and as we read on through the book of Acts we are going to meet Priscilla and Dorcas and Lydia, and also all the women Paul mentions in the last chapter of his letter to the Romans. How important is the place of women in the kingdom of God.

When Abraham Kuyper the great Dutch preacher went to his first church in 1863 he had a very inadequate grasp of what the gospel was, and one of the godly women in his congregation at Beesd was called Pietje Baltus. She was thirty years old, the unmarried daughter of a miller. At his first home visit she refused to shake hands with him because he was not clear in his gospel preaching, and she relented only when he insisted. “All right, I will shake hands with you as a fellow human being, not as a minister,” she said. He liked her and often went back to her and spoke to her because he wanted to learn from her. All the modernism he had picked up in his student days had not been sluiced out of his system. He did learn and developed a more biblical understanding of the gospel. When she was an old lady and he was a national political leader he arranged for her to have a small pension.

But this strong conviction of Pietje Baltus was not the position of these women was it? You could not say that at the cross, or early on the first day of the week when they walked to the Sepulcher that they had a lively faith. They were not going to the grave to see it open and Jesus alive, though they had heard him many times speak of his crucifixion and on the third day his resurrection. None of these people prepared his body for the sepulchre in a spirit of anticipation. They were not watching for Jesus with Messianic hope. It was for them simply an isolated and heartbreaking event. How well had they learned from him after three years? Did they see in the hanging corpse the body of the Son of the living God? They took him down from the cross in love, and washed and cleaned and dressed his body in love, and they covered him in spices in love, and buried him in love, but a love that is not joined to true faith is not spiritual, it is sentimental. It is human affection and admiration, it is not faith wrought by the Holy Spirit. What of your love for Jesus Christ, is it largely emotional? Is it a matter of feeling, and respect? What depth is there?

The Times has an agony aunt named Bel Mooney, and last week (Wednesday February 2nd, 2006) she answered a person who had written in with this question: “I have a problem answering my daughter’s twins, aged six and a half, when they ask me if I believe in Jesus. My daughter is a born-again Christian, and a single parent, and I (being divorced) see the children a lot, for example, we holiday together. The twins go to Sunday school as well as Bible classes after school once a week. But I am an atheist, so it becomes a problem how to answer. Please help.”

Amongst other things Bel Mooney replies, “Personally, I’d rather they were at Sunday school than stuck in front of the television watching the rubbish that many children are allowed to see. Fix on Jesus as a good man and answer accordingly.” But would a good man, if he were a mere man, claim that he would judge the whole human race and that from his lips men would receive their eternal destinies. Would a good man claim this? Our answer would be, “Is your atheism set in stone? Can you look again? Can’t you read and think about the person of the Lord Jesus Christ?”

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