As she cradled the battered body of her broken boy, Mary lifted her eyes to the heavens, from where help seemed not to come. Her lips moved and almost inaudibly, she whispered; my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, who is my salvation. These words spat out mingled with others that she knew from her Scriptures, I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me’ and ‘For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you cast me off?

As her tired hands held his cold ones, hope faded. The dreams that she had nurtured as his unborn body grew with her womb collapsed as her eyes took in the bloodied and beaten corpse. Hope had died. Her imagination as he had played with his brothers and sisters had soared as she had created a world in which injustice would be no more and Israel would be restored came crashing down as she held, in her arms, yet another victim of Rome’s intolerant justice.

Mary knew the stories of old: how God had rescued her ancestors. She had lived them through the celebration of Passover and the other festivals. She had seen in the vibrancy of her son that God still acted in the praises of those who could not see, in the dance of those who could walk and the breath of Lazarus, his friend. And yet, the hands that had shaped the mud to put on the eyes of the blind man and the feet that had partied at his bar mitzvah and at the wedding at Cana had been stilled. The lips that had tasted the wine and the hair that she had stroked when he was child and adult were palled and flat.

For Mary the stories of old could not take away the mind-numbing reality that death had come and for her would never be nothing at all. she remembered other deaths too, of Joseph; and what she would have given for that kind, strong and generous man to be with her now. She had lost Elizabeth and Zechariah too, and the wild man, John, with whom Jesus played in the Jordan when they were young.

The face of the ancient priest, Simeon, flooded unwanted into her mind. This is beyond piercing, more painful that could possibly be imagined. Nothing had prepared her for this.

It is hard to think of Mary like that. We do not do it very much at all. Good Friday has become mechanical; it has become a means of our salvation: our being made whole. We have stripped away from the Cross the corpse, as we have allowed the crescendo of our Easter alleluias to drown out the cries of the crucified and the agony of the mother who had lost her son. Death had been cleansed rather than allowed to remain jagged. Such torture has no part in our individualistic views of deliverance.

In being like this, we rob ourselves of reality and make our deliverance less than it is meant to be. Death is no longer allowed to be the last enemy; the one that angered Jesus at the grave of his friend. It is not something that then, as now, rips the heart out of families and mourning is invalidated because the man on the Cross is not allowed to be dead.

If he is dead, however, all sorts of possibilities are allowed to happen. That is a strange paradox, the possibilities of death. With the death of God’s Son comes not only the rumour of salvation; of the tangible probability that the older order of sin and death have been swept aside. What also comes is the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be human. For when we confront the deep darkness of death; then and only then can we accept our mortality and the sure and certain hope that we have been liberated.

For that Jesus has to be allowed to die. That is painful. Agony! An agony not just for him, but for us; for most us do not allow ourselves to be confronted by death.

The Shadow of Death has fallen.