There are too many Marys in the Gospel story!
It is hard to keep track of them all. From one Gospel to the next they are identified differently (by city, husband, child, or father) and so it is not even certain whether there are three, four, or more.
In this series of sketches, I have tried to stick to what seems certain. We know the Magdalene, the Mother of Jesus, and a third Mary are distinct. I have taken the conservative approach and made Mary of Bethany (who wiped His feet with her hair) a fourth.
In John’s gospel we read:
Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary (the wife) of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. (John 19:25)
Matthew reports:
There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Less and of Joses, and Salome (Mark 15:40)
Now it would seem that Mary of Clopas in John (the word “wife” is not in the text) is likely the Mary that is the mother of the disciple James the Less and of a man named Joseph in Mark.
That this Mary followed Jesus all the way to the Cross, but that her son did not is revealing.
Mary of Clopas showed more courage than her son the apostle. She was not done serving Jesus.
Now when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, that they might come and anoint Him. (Mark 16:1)
Mary of Clopas followed Jesus to the Cross and kept serving Him after He was dead. What a marvelous picture of loyalty, courage, and devotion. She loved Him when it no longer mattered (seemingly) to Him. There was nothing to be gained, but she came to His tomb.
Mary of Clopas was a ’small part’ of the story. Even her son, as a disciple, is the lesser James! So overshadowed is she by the Mother of God and the Magdalene that one Gospel writer says this:
Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. (Matthew 28:1)
“. . . and the other Mary . . .” Mary of Clopas spent her whole life as a follower of Jesus that was not that Mary.
I can relate to that and, perhaps, this Holy Saturday you can as well.
Holy Saturday is a good day to remember Mary of Clopas, because it is a day like her. It is wedged between the black terror of Good Friday and the golden glory of Easter. It is the day Jesus triumphed and harrowed Hell, but for humans it was a “nothing day.” It was the “day after.” It is all gray and all disappointment. The first bitter sorrow is passing, but more is to come. It is between the waves of two great emotions. It is the summer vacation between high school and college. It is nothing, but anticipates everything.
Mary of Clopas may have felt that she was the Summer Break of Marys, the other Mary, or the “in between one.” Mary, his mother, received the sword wound of prophesy on Good Friday when she held the dead body of her Son. Mary Magdalene, his friend and follower, was the great messenger of Easter morning when she saw Him alive.
Mary of Clopas is the Mary of the gray day, of Holy Saturday.
If you wanted to meet the equal to the apostles, you meant Mary Magdalene. If you wanted to meet His mother, you meant that Mary (or as my children said “Mary Mary”). She is the third Mary at the foot of the cross (who gets no lines in the movies) and nobody (or almost nobody) names their daughter “Mary” because of her.
And yet she was there. She was at the Cross and at the tomb and this Holy Saturday she is the one I can most understand. I cannot imagine being great like the Magdalene and as for the woman who said “let it be done unto me . . .” and sang the Magnificat? Forget about it.
That is greatness I can honor, but not hope to emulate.
But, perhaps, with God’s grace, I can be like Mary of Clopas. I can be there. I can stand with Him on Good Friday and come to His tomb on Holy Saturday.
Or perhaps not . . . because I am a man after all and the men were not vouchsafed such a vision.
Even John, who followed Him to the Cross, was not allowed to see Him first at the tomb. John was back with Peter hiding and afraid. And a good excuse was at hand for the men, “What good would it do to anoint His Body? Women’s work. Right?”
Men are most often too pragmatic, too chauvinistic, to fill the Mary of Clopas role.
Maybe the role of Mary of Clopas is beyond me, but it is not (I think) beyond the thousands of women I have met in home-schools, churches, and work places across America. They are proud of their famous sisters, but they are not famous. They are the “other” Mary, doing what God calls them to do.
You can hear the condescension of the worldly, the radical feminists, and misogynists:
Women’s work. Nurse. Secretary. Lawyer facing the glass ceiling.
Mother. Socially useless. “Yes, but what do you do?”
Third place. Bronze medal, but worked just as hard to get there.
They are the other Hillary, the one not running for president, but keeping their small church together. They are the the other Condaleeza, the one not negotiating with nations, but negotiating to keep friends from flying apart. They are the other Anna, not the tabloid super model getting headlines in her sorrowful death, but the one who dies quietly having lived a faithful, dutiful life.
It is noble to be Queen or president. It is amazing to be Secretary of State and remarkable to be beautiful enough to be on the cover of magazines.
It is also very good to be Mary of Clopas.
God knows. He sees you there. He does not denigrate your effort or demean it. He honors faithful devotion. He does not confuse you with the others.
He knows you. He knows your name.
And so Mary of Clopas, the woman we know so little about, turns out to have been one of those silent women that are always in the right place at the right time. Keeping her presence straight amongst the more famous Marys is hard, but God never confused her for another or forgot her! Jesus knew her name, it is written on His hand, and the tool that placed it there was the nail of the Cross.
—
And all this human confusion about names brings us to an interesting exercise in “probability” and “improbability.”
The Discovery Channel rushed to breathlessly report on the tomb of Jesus Christ, and that they had His “body,” without considering a simpler hypothesis.
The Greek in John 19 is very ambiguous.
It supports Mary of Clopas being Mary’s sister or cousin. Because as it seems unlikely that a family would name two children “Mary,” most scholars reject Mary of Clopas being the sister of the Virgin Mary (they apparently know nothing of the George Foreman family). But if one assumes instead that she was a cousin of Mary, then a simpler explanation is open to us regarding the so-called tomb of Jesus, than a massive (and psychologically improbable) conspiracy to cover up the continued (and normal) life of Jesus Christ.
The BBC reports that the “tomb of Jesus” contains the following bone boxes:
According to the Israel Antiquities Authority, six of those coffins were marked with the names Mary; Matthew; Jesua son of Joseph; Mary; Jofa (Joseph, Jesus’ brother); and Judah son of Jesua.
Let us assume that Mary of Clopas is one of the women in the tomb and that Clopas was her father and not her husband.
“Joseph” was a common name in the culture (much like John today). We need only assume that two cousins married men with the same first name. What would be remarkable about that cousin naming one of her son’s after her cousin’s marvelous son?
We know that one of the “sons of Mary” in the tomb was Joseph and that Mary of Clopas had a son named Joseph. What about “Judah son of Jesus?” Mary of Clopas son Jesus (Jesus Christ’s second cousin) married the other Mary in the tomb (just as the Discovery Channel assumes). For all we know, this Mary could have been Mary Magdalene, just as the producers state (though on no evidence). This Mary and Jesus had a son named Judah (also a common name).
Now I don’t think this is all very likely, but it is more likely than the Discovery Channel theory.
If they are right, then Jesus Christ survived a Roman crucifixion. He lived in Jerusalem surrounded by His friends and enemies. His enemies never noticed him, his wife, or his child. His friends died believing He was in Heaven as God’s son. He let them and they never got wise to his continued life.
I suppose this could be true, but it seems less probable than that Jesus Christ’s family on his mother’s side used the same names (Mary, Jesus, James, Joseph) over and over again as many families do.
My “theory” points out the common interchange of names in highly religious and patriarchal cultures. Just from the New Testament, it is hard to keep all the Mary’s straight . . . and we have two prominent people named James . . . and two Josephs. . . . and two Simons.
I only need assume the Mary of the tomb (and we know there were “multiple Marys” in the Gospel account) was the daughter of Clopas (which Roman Christians have often asserted long before the discovery of the tomb) and that she was married to a man named Joseph. She then had a son she named after her cousin Mary’s remarkable boy “Jesus” . . . and “Jesus” was a common name in the period.
That is confusing genealogically, but the only (somewhat) improbable thing is that two cousins of the same name would marry men with the same common name. But surely one need not look very hard to find a local family with two cousins named “Maria” who married men named “Jose” . . . who then (because it was somewhat of a family joke) named some of their children the same names.
In any case, it is much more psychologically likely (I can imagine it in my own family), than everyone dying for a lie perpetuated by a man they had followed because He did not lie to them.
Mary of Clopas turns out to be very interesting indeed!