Christian Podcast Central
From Dewey Bertolini, Pastor of The Safe Haven in McMinnville, OR
My heart goes out to Mother Mary.
Her name means “Bitterness.” Sadly, and quite frankly, in many ways Mary lived up to her name.
Being the mother of Jesus was no small task. One that she fulfilled with great dignity. But boy did she face her challenges.
In this PODCAST, we will gaze upon a Scriptural snapshot of Mary unlike anything you have ever seen before. Not only that, but we will encounter Jesus in His darkest hour, second only to that night before the crucifixion when He sweat drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.
As we do, our love for Him will deepen. Our respect for His mom will broaden. And our understanding of the both of them will stir up within our own hearts a sense of God’s presence in our lives like we’ve never experienced before.
Let’s begin by reading Luke 8:19-21 (NLT):
19 Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him, but they couldn’t get to him because of the crowd.20 Someone told Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, and they want to see you.”
21 Jesus replied, “My mother and my brothers are all those who hear God’s word and obey it.”
Okay… so, what makes this (probably) the lowest point in Jesus’ life with the exception of Gethsemane and His betrayal? Well, first of all, we need to look at it through Mary’s eyes – a mother (probably a widow) who traveled quite a distance to try to see her Son…
My name, as you may know is Mary. Which is a curious name because it actually means “bitterness”. Now, wouldn’t you think that of all the people whose names have graced the pages of the Bible that I, Mother Mary, would be the most joyful? Not bitter. I would be one of the happiest, most blessed individuals in all of the Bible. Not one whose name reflects sorrow, challenges, or heartache. But for whatever reason, my parents named me “Bitterness”.
And as you study my life, you will discover that my life – while filled with much grace and blessedness – was filled with equal amounts of heartache, sorrow, and yes… bitterness.
Put yourself in my place for a moment and imagine how you would feel.
I was just a teenage girl at the time, of marrying age, and I was in fact engaged to a wonderful young man by the name of Joseph. But we lived in Nazareth – a backward little town, a town that was the butt of many people’s jokes. The word on the street was, “Could anything good come out of Nazareth?”
And really, the town was so small and isolated and provincial that it was basically one big extended family – everybody was somehow related to everybody. We were just a few hundred people living on the top of a little hill. The only reason that the town was even founded was the tiny fact that there was a well there. We had water.
But we were so far out of the way that nobody every bothered us. Nobody even cared about us. Most of our people were farmers and we all worked hard to eke out a living. The rocky land gave very little help when it came to raising crops.
My fiancé was one of the few there who actually had a trade – a stonemason or builder (despite that most Bibles today refer to him as a carpenter). But how many houses could he build for such a small community? So Joseph had to “commute” to work – walking about five miles each day to the little town of Sepphoris.
Now, as small as Sepphoris used to be, as Joseph worked there, it was a growing Roman town. Jews didn’t go there. And our neighbors would whisper jeers at him as he walked to and from work each day saying that he was building the Roman’s city for them. Some people saw him as a traitor to our faith. But I believed in him and I defended him.
Everything changed in a blink of an eye with one angelic visitation (It’s amazing how angels appearing always seems to change so much). The first thing he said to me was, “Don’t be afraid, Mary” because I was indeed scared to death! And the angel told me something that I couldn’t even begin to process at the time: you see, I was faithful to Joseph and we were not married yet. I had not slept with any man, yet the angel told me that I was going to have a child, and that I was going to bare a son, and that his name was going to be not Joseph, but Jesus which means “Savior”. He was to be our long-awaited Messiah!
How do you wrap your mind around something like that??
Was I dreaming? I didn’t know what to say. All I could mutter was, “Let it be done to me according to your will.”
Now, everything was fine for a short while, but after just a few weeks, you can’t hide something like being pregnant out of wedlock. And as I began to “show”, people started whispering about me. Not just about Joseph (traitor to the faith, builder of the city for the Romans), but now they mocked him because they assumed that I was unfaithful behind his back. Or could it be that the baby was Joseph’s (and that’s when the rumors really took off)
I can’t tell you the level of shame and isolation that I felt.
And what could I tell them? “You don’t understand! This is GOD’S baby! The angel Gabriel (remember Gabriel from the story of Daniel??) actually came to me!
I was humiliated.
Even Joseph was cynical at first, which was understandable. But, he was kind and compassionate and understanding. He actually could have had me stoned, or could have divorced me, but instead he was visited by Gabriel as well!
And then, when I was about eight months along, word came from Rome – from Caesar himself – that a new tax was going to be imposed upon us. And not only did we have to pay even more money to the Romans so that they could conquer even more people as they had us, but now we had to travel far away to the home of our ancestors in order to register there for the tax. Now, while my family hailed from Nazareth, Joseph’s family originally came from Bethlehem – 100 miles south from where we were living.
So, since I was legally obligated to him, we had to travel that long distance while eight months pregnant! We faced the danger of bandits, the perils of nature, and all that comes with the final month of pregnancy. I began to understand why my mother named me “Bitterness”.
Maybe she knew something that I didn’t know.
It took longer than it should have due to my condition, but about ten days after leaving Nazareth, we entered Bethlehem.
And, as God would have it, I started going into labor JUST as we were entering into Bethlehem! But there was no room for us anywhere. Not even at Joseph’s own family’s house – especially since they knew we weren’t married yet I was “great with child”. So they turned us away, since they saw me as an immoral woman.
What could we do?
All we could find was a cave, so that’s where we went. And the only bed we could find was a horse’s feeding trough with a mattress of the hay that had been lying there for the animals.
So it was there that I gave birth without a doctor, nurse, or midwife. Just me, Joseph, the animals, and my pain and anguish. I was scared to say the least. Scared to death.
Of course, once Jesus was born, the joy that I felt eclipsed all the fear and hardship we had endured. Yet there I was, an unmarried teenage girl with a baby – rejected by both of our families.
What were we going to do?
I couldn’t believe the things that people said about this baby of ours. There was a local group of shepherds who came by and worshiped Him, as though He were God. When we took Him to the temple to dedicate Him to the Lord, two very Godly, elderly people cradled Him in their arms and made the most amazing predictions about Him! One of which I have never forgotten because it didn’t seem to fit with the joy these people had on their faces: They said that this boy was going to bring to me great sorrow, even to the point where I would feel like a great knife was piercing my own heart and soul.
This began the process of me trying to figure out how to raise the Son of God.
Where to begin?
I find it almost comical that in the 21st century, there are people that treat me almost as a god. There are people who pray to me – who worship ME! They call me “The Mother of God”. I never saw myself as that. I simply saw myself as Jesus’ mommy.
While He was the Son of God, I was merely the mother of a very little, fragile, delicate, baby boy.
Then, there was the time, twelve years later, when we lost Him!
We were in a large caravan of people, having left the temple. Three days we had traveled thinking that He must be with someone within our large group. When Joseph and I ran back, we found him talking it up with the rabbis, blowing them away with His understanding of God’s Word at such a young age.
He was perfect.
And let me tell you, raising a perfect boy is no easy task. Nor was being raised as a sibling of a perfect boy. Just ask Jesus’ brothers and sisters.
Now the pages of the Bible don’t say anything at all about me, or Jesus’ siblings from there until His ministry began. First, there was the wedding where He miraculously turned the water into amazing wine.
Then there’s Luke 8:19-21.
You see, I had four sons who had no respect for their oldest half-brother. They saw what was going on: the crowds, the miracles, the teaching. But they just could not bring themselves to believe that their Brother was the Messiah. Even though I shared with them all the stories about His birth and what the angel had told their father and me. Still, they resented Jesus. They were jealous to the core of His fame and the fact that they were stuck back at home working and taking care of me while Jesus roamed from city to city with thousands of people following and clinging to His every word and deed.
Then, it became clear that Jesus was also getting the attention of the wrong people. Herod Antipas had ordered for His cousin, John the Baptizer, to be killed. And it was pretty clear that my Jesus was going to be on Antipas’ list soon. You can imagine how this news made me feel, as His mom.
And then, there was talk amongst the rabbis. Just a year prior, Jesus was in high demand by the religious leaders. He was invited into the synagogues of every town that He went to and asked to speak. But not anymore. In fact, when He spoke at His hometown’s synagogue in Nazareth, the people took Him out to a cliff and were ready to throw Him off and kill Him then and there.
And all I could do was sit back and watch all of this.
And now, I kept hearing reports that the religious leaders were denouncing Him, saying terrible things about Him, even stalking Him, practically hunting Him down.
They even accused Him of being possessed – or even Satan, himself!
So we had a family meeting. We realized that with the way things were going, it would not be long before Jesus would be killed. Over time, I started to believe some of the things that my sons had been telling me, and we decided to attempt an intervention before things got too carried away.
We found out that He was going to be at a particular home teaching and we made plans to work our way through the crowd and – for lack of a better word – kidnap Him and bring Him back to Nazareth.
In Mark 3, you’ll see the admission of my greatest failure as Jesus’ mom:
20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
You see, not only were the crowds and rabbis turning against Him, but now my poor Jesus’ own mother did not behave in such a way that the Son of God deserved. My boys and I honestly believed that Jesus had lost His mind.
And it broke my heart when:
…Someone told Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, and they want to see you.”
21 Jesus replied, “My mother and my brothers are all those who hear God’s word and obey it.”
It was if, in His eyes, I wasn’t His mother anymore.
Do you understand the weight of what I’m saying? I am a woman, who in my greatest hours of need, felt totally abandoned by everyone.
And now, because of me, Jesus felt abandoned, too.
Up to this point in His life, this was Jesus’ darkest hour.
What’s amazing is that the Bible doesn’t speak of me again after this, until I am at the foot of Jesus’ cross, where with one of His last dying breaths, He calls me His mother and makes sure that His disciple, John, will take care of me.
So, why is it important that the story of Mary and Jesus’ brothers coming after Him be told?
- People need to understand who Mary really was. She wasn’t perfect. She was simply a young girl who did the best that she could in a tough situation. Yet, when Jesus needed her most, she had turned against Him.
- There will be days when other people will feel abandoned, isolated, shamed and alone – even bitter. I want people to know that they are not alone with those experiences – I was right there.
- People need to know that when they feel completely alone and abandoned. When they feel like even their closest friends and family have turned their backs on them – Jesus was right there.
But, in truth, Jesus wasn’t alone. God was with Him at all times. And He is with us as well!
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