Wombs That Never Bore

Palm Sunday

I always forget just how packed with story Palm Sunday is.  I joked with my mom tonight that I feel like I can skip ahead to Easter Sunday now.  Although, of course, I'm actually glad we'll have a chance to linger with each of the pieces of today.

The only way to really handle writing about such a big spread of story is to zero in on a single section or pan out and take in the full picture.

A verse got stuck in my head tonight.  Jesus telling the women weeping on His behalf that they should weep instead for themselves and for their children.  A time is coming when they will say, blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore fruit.

It takes being at least something of a scholar of history to appreciate what a reversal that is.  Right through to the present day, in many ways, women who are barren were thought under a curse and the displeasure of God.  Marked as sinful or unworthy or even devilish in significant chunks of our history.  Certainly failed women.

Someday soon, that shame will be reversed, Jesus warns.

What a terrible upheaval is coming -- something so terrible a mother will wish her children had never happened.

That's something that is quite literally unfathomable to me as a non-mother.  And I didn't spend a lot of time at this exercise for sanity reasons, but I can't imagine thinking that if I saw one of my beloved students in pain.  Oh, if only they had never been.

And it's a trope in literature to wish that about yourself, but I confess I do not understand it.

The only time it's ever made a kind of sense to me was actually in the movie Dogma, which the Church rightfully hated as a movie, when a devil character tries to help the (terribly sympathetic) antagonists of the film (who ultimately just want to go home to their family and be with God again) specifically BECAUSE them succeeding will destroy the entirety of creation.  Nothingness is better than eternal Hell, he immediately explains.

What could be worth a soul's light going out?

But then, maybe I'm missing the point.  Jesus doesn't say that they'll wish they had never had children, just that the luckiest will be the ones who never did.  Who don't have to watch someone they love in that ultimate way suffer.  Who can make their way on their own through the upheaval?

Man, this is depressing, because I feel we are all bound to each other.  Is that just our luxury?  To think that we are all in this together because a time of torment isn't sweeping down on us?

Or is that the luxury of the women who have never been mothers?  To have the privilege to imagine that if we keep our heads, we can all or most of us get out of this situation alive.  Mothers and fathers prioritize their children.

And come to think of it, isn't that the justification in so many terrible stories for why people cooperate with terrible things?  Isn't that why Captain Von Trapp tries (briefly, of course) to convince himself to take the Nazi's commission to keep his family safe under the Third Reich?  Because if there is someone you love beyond all reason, suddenly taking care of everyone seems like a luxury you can't afford.  Suddenly principles cannot be the highest place in your heart.

Perhaps this is the real key to Jesus's insistence that you can't have father, brother, friends, lovers and be His followers.  You can't have someone you would choose over the whole world.  Someone you can't bear to sacrifice to save others.

Even God didn't have that.

And maybe that's what helps us understand what God did more than anything else.  To be a parent in such times and to be a good person is to risk and even lose the child whom you love more than all the world.  Oh beware the day, women of Jerusalem, when you know how God felt on the day Jesus carried His cross to Calgary.