Love That Does Not Look Away
Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.” (John 19:26–27)
The whole week has been building to this. Mary poured out everything she had. The Greeks arrived at the door seeking. Judas walked out into the night. Jesus knelt on the floor with a towel. And now we are here: outside the city walls, at a place called The Skull, and the one who has been drawing us closer all week is being stretched out between heaven and earth.
John’s account of the crucifixion is unlike the others. There is no ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ cry of desolation here. John’s Jesus is sovereign throughout. When the soldiers come to the garden, he steps forward to meet them: ‘For whom are you looking?’ When Pilate tries to intimidate him, Jesus reframes the question: ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.’ In the end he bows his head and gives up his spirit — gives it, as an act of will.
And yet. In the middle of all this sovereign dignity, there is a moment of absolute tenderness that stops the narrative in its tracks. Jesus looks down from the cross and sees his mother. He sees the disciple he loved standing beside her. And in the midst of his own dying, he makes sure she will not be left alone. ‘Woman, here is your son.’ ‘Here is your mother.’
This is the cost of drawing near, in its fullest form. All week we have been watching what happens when people get close to this kind of love. Mary poured out everything. The Greeks were welcomed. The disciples were fractured when one of them could not bear the weight. And now those who are closest are standing at the cross. They have not run. They are here.
That is itself a prophetic act. The powerful have all left. Pilate has retreated into his headquarters. The chief priests have got what they wanted and gone home. The crowds have dispersed. The disciples have scattered. But the women are here. The beloved disciple is here. Presence in the place of suffering, when everyone else has found good reasons to be elsewhere – that is one of the most demanding forms of love there is.
We live in a culture that is very good at looking away from poverty and suffering. We scroll past the images. We develop the algorithms and the sophisticated numbness that lets us function. And sometimes the church has facilitated that looking away; preaching a gospel so focused on personal salvation that it forgot the people dying outside the city walls.
John’s Gospel will not let us do that. The cross is outside the city, in the place of public shame, and Jesus is lifted up there in full view. Not hidden. Not managed. Not sanitised. And the ones who love him do not avert their eyes.
Desmond Tutu wrote that the cross is God’s way of saying: I will not abandon you in your suffering. I will go there with you. I will be found in the worst place. That is the pastoral heart of Good Friday. Whatever you are carrying, whatever cross is being pressed into your shoulders this week, you are not carrying it somewhere God has never been.
But there is also a prophetic edge here that must be spoken. The cross was an instrument of state violence. Rome used crucifixion to crush resistance and terrify subject peoples into submission. Jesus was executed as a political threat by a colonial power in collaboration with a compromised local religious establishment. That is not incidental background detail; it is the context. And if the Son of God was killed by that system, then any system that operates the same way, crushing the poor, eliminating the inconvenient, executing those who threaten the arrangement, stands under the same judgement.
Good Friday is not a day for quiet individual piety alone. It is a day that encourages us to notice state-sanctioned suffering and refuse to look away. It is the day we say: this is where our God was found. Which means this is where we must be found too. Staying. Watching. Speaking out. Refusing to leave.
The women stayed. The beloved disciple stayed. They could not stop what was happening. They could not fix it. But they did not go home. And that, that refusal to leave the one who is suffering, is sometimes the only act of love that remains. It is enough. It is everything.