The Holy Rage of Mary: An Easter Ritual in Parts

 

Below is the full version of the Holy Rage of Mary service I offered on Easter.

She Bakes Bread

Mary bakes bread. Because she loves feeding people, but also because some days, it’s the only thing that keeps her hands steady. The kneading, the folding, the way the dough resists at first and then softens, something about it makes the world feel survivable for a few minutes. It doesn’t fix anything. Her son is still gone. The state still kills. But in the silence of early morning, when the village is barely stirring, her hands remember how to press and shape life from flour and water and salt. She used to bake with him at her side, flour on his nose, laughing.

She meets with other women in the evenings. They bring food, mostly simple things, lentils, olives, torn bread. And they bring their stories. Of sons lost. Of bodies bruised. Of the quiet ways empire seeps into their homes. Mary doesn’t always speak first. Some nights she can’t speak at all. But when she does, her voice is steady and unadorned. “They called him a threat,” she says, “because he said the truth out loud.” And the women nod, because they’ve heard that before. “He healed people for free,” she adds. “He said the kingdom belongs to children. He asked questions that made officials sweat.”

When she tells the story, she doesn’t dress it up. She doesn’t say he floated above the pain. She says he screamed. She says he was afraid. She says the sky went black and the ground split and still, they didn’t stop. Her rage isn’t sharp anymore. It’s thick. It sits low in her belly and rises sometimes, in her throat, without warning. She wakes up crying, not always remembering why, because grief doesn’t follow rules. Because trauma rewires the body.

Some days, she can’t imagine the next week, let alone a hundred years from now. What would they even call him then? Would they make statues? Would they forget what he actually said? Would they call him white? Would they clean his blood from the story and say it was beautiful?

She goes on. She feeds people. She listens. She tells the story again and again. Not because it brings her peace, but because silence would feel like betrayal. Her rage is love, burning clean. Her grief is holy. Her story is not finished.

2. A Story Repeated

Mary tells the story again.

She tells it sitting on a woven mat, legs tucked under, her voice quiet but unsparing. There’s a boy down the street who reminds her of him, same soft eyes, same stubbornness. She wonders if that mother feels the clock ticking too, the way she used to. The way she still does.

Sometimes people ask her what it was like, raising him. They want something sacred. They want light streaming from his face. But he was just a boy. A kind one. He scraped his knees. He cried when his cousin died. He loved fig jam. He made friends with people no one else would touch.

She remembers how he argued with the priest when he was twelve. Called out hypocrisy. Said truth like it belonged to him. That was when she knew. Not because of angels or stars, but because power doesn’t forgive that kind of clarity.

And yet, she let him go. Watched him walk into towns where soldiers patrolled the streets, watched him speak in public knowing the wrong person might hear. Her stomach hurt constantly. She prayed, though not in words. Her prayers were in the way she packed his satchel. The way she kissed his forehead without letting him see the fear in her eyes.

After it happened, there were days she didn’t speak. Just sat with other mothers, breathing. They didn’t ask her to explain. They knew. The state makes it look like justice. But it’s always about fear, fear of boys who love too loudly, who preach liberation, who refuse to bow.

Now, years later, she forgets things. Leaves water boiling too long. Forgets what day it is. But she never forgets his voice. And she tells the story not to enshrine him, but to resist forgetting what was done. What keeps being done.

One night, a woman with gray-streaked hair asks her, “Do you think it meant anything? His death?” Mary doesn’t answer right away. She tears bread in silence. Then she says, “He told the truth. That meant something.”

She doesn’t speak of resurrection the way others do. For her, it is quieter. It’s the boy down the street learning to read. It’s a stranger offering bread without price. It’s women gathering, again and again, saying the names of the dead.

She doesn’t want statues. She wants justice.

The Rage in Her Body

The rage never left.

It changed shape. It moved deeper. But it stayed. At first it lived in her throat, raw, sharp, unrelenting. She couldn’t swallow. Could barely breathe. Her body rejected food. Her hands shook for days. People called it grief, and it was. But grief braided tightly with rage. She wasn’t just mourning her son. She was mourning every moment she had to keep him quiet in public. Every time she tugged at his sleeve and whispered, Not here. Not now.

Because she'd known. Not everything, not the details, but she’d known what happens to boys who disrupt the order. She’d seen the way soldiers looked at him. She saw how temple officials flinched when he spoke. The rage lived in her spine for years before he died. She walked with it. Carried it. A mother’s rage isn’t always loud. Sometimes it simmers.

She didn’t let it consume her. But she also didn’t let it go.

After the burial, she felt nothing for days. People brought her food. She couldn’t eat. They said prayers. She didn’t listen. Then one morning she stood in the doorway, watching the light fall across the floor, and she felt it rise again. Hot, steady, heavy. Rage. Not just at what was done, but at how the world kept turning like nothing had happened.

She found herself scrubbing floors until her hands bled. Stirring lentils with too much force. Speaking too sharply. She apologized more than she wanted to. But the rage wasn’t cruelty. It was grief with nowhere to go.

So she began to give it direction. She started asking questions, the kind he used to ask. She invited other mothers to speak. She challenged the way elders talked about obedience. She refused to be silent during the readings. Rage, she found, could become clarity. Could sharpen love into something fierce and necessary.

She still wakes some mornings with clenched fists. She stretches. Breathes deep. The rage hums under her skin, steady as a drumbeat. It reminds her of what matters. It reminds her she is alive.

The Weight of Knowing

She was a child when the angel came.

Thirteen, maybe. Still learning how to braid her hair. Still giggling with cousins, stealing fruit, racing barefoot through the dust. She wasn’t looking for prophecy. She wasn’t asking for glory. When the angel spoke, she said yes because she didn’t know what else to say. Because the words were beautiful. Because she was brave. Because she didn’t yet understand what love would cost.

And now, decades later, she wonders: what kind of God tells a child she will bear a son destined to die?

She doesn’t remember all of it. The light, the voice. It’s faded with time. But she remembers the feeling in her chest. A mix of terror and wonder. The way the air changed. The way her skin felt too small for her bones. She remembers holding the knowledge like a secret stone in her belly, her child would be holy. Her child would be hated.

She held that knowing through every stage. Through morning sickness. Through whispered judgment. Through his first steps. Through his first refusal to obey unjust rules. She smiled when people praised his wisdom, but inside, her stomach knotted tighter each year. The more he became himself, the more she felt the weight of what was coming.

She sometimes imagines what might have happened if she’d said no. If she’d begged the angel to choose someone else. If she’d run. But that’s not who she was. Not who she is. And even now, broken open and years beyond the worst day of her life, she does not regret loving him.

Still, the weight of knowing lives in her. A kind of haunted wisdom. When she sees young girls walking alone, she wants to shield them, not from pregnancy, not from angels, but from the cost of saying yes before they understand what they’re being asked to carry.

In her book group, they sometimes read the old prophets. Isaiah. Jeremiah. They argue over the meanings, over what justice looks like. One woman says, “Maybe we’re all too young when it starts. Maybe that’s the point.” Mary doesn’t answer. Just traces the rim of her cup and thinks: Some things, no one should be asked to bear.

She tells her story now not for sympathy, not for reverence, but for honesty. For the record. So that people know what it really meant to carry that child, to love him, to lose him, to live with it. The knowing was never abstract. It lived in her back, her breath, her heartbeat. And it still does.

What They Made of It

Mary doesn’t recognize the stories they tell about her boy anymore.

She hears whispers sometimes, strangers passing through town, talking about miracles like magic tricks, about a kingdom like a golden throne, about power and glory and light that blinds. They speak his name with pride, but not with intimacy. They don’t mention how his feet blistered, how his voice cracked when he sang, how he wept when Lazarus died.

They say Messiah like a weapon. They say Son of God like it means he didn’t feel pain. As if divinity erased his tenderness. As if being holy made him less human. They’ve already started to clean up the blood in the story, started calling the cross a victory instead of a lynching. Mary listens, and she doesn’t know what to say. She never imagined it would become this.

She couldn’t imagine two thousand years. She could barely imagine the next season. She wasn’t thinking about theology or doctrine. She was thinking about keeping her child alive in a world that feared brown boys who preached liberation. She was thinking about holding it together when her whole world split open.

She didn’t ask for sainthood. Didn’t ask to be softened into a statue. She was a girl who said yes. A mother who gave birth in blood and straw. A woman who buried her son after the state murdered him in public. And now people speak of her like she floated above it all, untouched. They want her pure. Silent. Eternal. But she was angry. She was tired. She was real.

She can barely sit through some of the gatherings now. The men speak too confidently. They debate his nature, his titles, like puzzle pieces. They forget his laughter. Forget how he washed feet. Forget how he flipped tables. She wants to stand and shout, He wasn’t safe. He wasn’t sweet. He wasn’t what you’re trying to make him.

Sometimes she dreams of a world where he lived. Just lived. A quiet life. Maybe became a teacher, a father, a neighbor. Maybe he’d have gone gray. Maybe they’d argue about politics over dinner. Maybe he'd have built her a small house by the olive trees. The grief hits her fresh all over again when she wakes.

Mary doesn't need anyone to worship her son. She needed them to listen to him. And they didn’t. Not then. And now, so many of the people speaking in his name are building empires instead of feeding the hungry.

She does what she can. Tells the truth. Tells the stories as they really happened, as best she remembers them. Not for history books. For the boys growing up now. For the mothers who will bury them. For the hope that someone, somewhere, will finally hear him.

Holy Rage

Mary’s grief was never gentle.

That’s just the version they tell, the one made safe for sanctuaries and stained glass. The truth is, her grief burned. It cracked her ribs. It made her shake. And beneath it all was rage. Not wild, not reckless, clear. Her rage did not consume her. It clarified her.

She did not scream at the sky. She did not tear down governments. She did something harder. She stayed. She told the story again and again. She sat with women whose sons were taken too. She baked bread. She lit candles. She said their names. She made the memory stick. That is what rage became in her: not fire that destroyed, but coals that stayed lit, long after the world turned cold.

People think we remember Jesus because of miracles. Because of crosses and tombs and angels at dawn. But we remember him because his mother refused to forget. Because she refused to let the state disappear him. Because her rage carved a space in time where the story could live. She made the world remember that a boy was killed for being too loving, too disruptive, too unafraid. That matters.

They called her holy because she bore him. But she was holy because she raged.

Rage was what allowed her to survive when nothing made sense. Rage gave her language when the grief stole her words. Rage sat beside her when others turned away. Rage steadied her voice when she stood in the town square and told them what was done to her son.

Her calm was not peace. It was discipline. It was strength. It was the long, slow burn of justice carried in the body. Her gentleness was not absence of anger, but anger channeled into care. Into action. Into witness. That’s what they miss, when they paint her in blue and white, head bowed, hands folded. They forget the woman who stayed at the cross. Who watched, who wailed, who remembered.

And maybe that’s why the story survived. Because Mary held it. Protected it. Because she didn’t let her son become just another name lost to empire. Because she knew what they were trying to do, and she refused. Her rage is why we’re still telling this story two thousand years later.

Let her not be remembered just for her sorrow, but for her refusal to let sorrow be the final word. 

Let her be remembered as the mother who made the truth impossible to bury. Let her be known not only for her “yes” to the angel, but for her “no” to silence.

Her rage made her whole. Her rage made her holy. And in that rage, the world was changed.