Missing the Path

Mark 15:37–47.

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• women looking on from a distance
• ministered to him
• took courage and went to Pilate
• saw where he was laid

Applying the Word to My Life:
We are at the crucifixion, and it's worth noticing who isn't in this part of the story. Peter, the one who'd sworn he'd never fall away, has already denied even knowing Jesus. And now he's nowhere to be found.

By the time Joseph of Arimathea works up the courage to ask Pilate for the body, the only witnesses left, in every Gospel, are the women — Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome. These are the same women who followed Jesus and provided for Him back in Galilee.

This isn't a quiet vigil. It's the aftermath of a public execution carried out by the state, and being known to associate with the condemned wasn't a small risk in that city at that moment. Nobody watching had any reason to think things would change in just three days. As far as anyone standing there could tell, this was just a hopeless ending.

It would be easy to read this the same way as yesterday's tomb — different responses to the same absence, both legitimate, tailored to what each person needed. That's not what's happening here. Staying with Jesus at His Passion and burial wasn't one valid path among several. It was the right thing to do, and Peter's absence wasn't a different-but-equally-good calling. It was abandonment out of fear.

Not every possible response to God comes from Him asking something different of us. Some of it is just fear wearing the costume of a personal path. It may look the same, but there's a real difference between "this isn't my way of encountering Him" and "I was afraid, so I left." The first is something to honor. The second is something to name honestly.

And it's the same two women who stay long enough to see exactly where He's laid, once Joseph wraps the body and rolls the stone across the entrance. Not a large gesture. Just enough presence of mind to notice the location, because someone was eventually going to need to come back.

But this isn't only an indictment: Jesus doesn't write Peter off for denying Him three times, and He doesn't make him wait for it either. Within the same week He's back in the room where the disciples are hiding. Later, at the shore, He finds Peter and asks him, by name, three times, whether he loves Him — undoing the three denials one at a time. Failing Him in the moment doesn't disqualify us from being pursued by Him later.

Whatever your particular mission looks like, it really is tailored to you — your gifts, your circumstances, the specific shape God asks you to take. That might mean a call to solitude, a life of poverty, holding back from some impulse, or serving people in crisis. But whatever shape it takes, it comes with real cost: risk, sacrifice, persecution. That cost isn't tailored. It's simply what it means to have a mission at all.

That's what was actually happening at the cross. Staying was one instance of that cost showing up, and it's tempting, in any instance, to call the hard version "not your path" instead of facing it. Whatever your mission, the cost will come. The only real question is whether you'll be there when it does.

My Response for Today:
Today I will look at one part of my faith life I've been avoiding and ask if I'm being more like Mary or Peter.