From the Cross He Arranged Who Would Take Care of His Mother

Nobody tells you how long it lasts.

That is the part that gets left out of every conversation about looking after the older ones. Everybody agrees it is a good thing to do. Everybody says the right sentences about it at church. And nobody mentions that it is not a season, it is a decade, and that the decade has no visible edge in it anywhere.

There is a person reading this who has driven somebody to the same building forty times. Who translates every appointment. Who is on the phone about a bill that is not theirs, in a language they think in only half of. Who has a job as well, and children, and who has not had a single unclaimed Saturday in four years.

And when they say anything about it, the reply is that they will be blessed for it, and that is true, and it is not the sentence they needed.

So I want to do something different. I want to look at what Jesus did about exactly this in the last hour of His life, because it is one of the strangest and most practical things in the Gospels.

He stopped in the middle of it to sort out a household

Set the scene properly, because familiarity has worn the strangeness off it.

He is being executed. He has hours left. Everything cosmic that has ever been claimed about that afternoon is happening. And in the middle of it He turns His head and deals with a domestic logistics problem.

When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home. (John 19:26-27, King James Version)

From that hour. John records the timestamp. Not eventually, not after the funeral. From that hour, a man took an elderly woman into his house, and the arrangement started immediately.

Anybody who has ever wondered whether the practical care of an old person is spiritual work, or merely the thing that has to be got through before the spiritual work starts, has that verse to settle it. It was important enough to be handled from a cross.

You are doing work that was treated as urgent in the most important hour in history. John 19:27 records the hour it took effect, and it is His Spirit, named in Hebrews 9:14 as the eternal Spirit by whom He offered Himself in that same hour, who holds both of those things inside one act of obedience.

Paul rates this higher than most people would dare

The New Testament does not treat this care as optional or as a nice extra. Paul says something about it that is almost shocking in its severity.

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. (1 Timothy 5:8)

And the whole passage that sentence sits in is about the practical support of widows and elderly relatives. It is not a general statement about family feeling. It is about money, food, housing and time.

I am not quoting that to load anybody up. Anybody reading this who is already doing it does not need that verse aimed at them and I would not aim it. I am quoting it for the opposite reason: because a person carrying this work usually thinks of it as the unglamorous part, the part that is not ministry, the thing they do instead of serving.

Scripture puts it at the top. Not near the top. Paul measures faith by it in that sentence, which means the driving and the phone calls and the appointments are the ministry and not the obstacle to it.

You have been doing the thing Scripture ranks at the top, not the thing that keeps you from it. 1 Timothy 5:8 measures faith by the providing, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, that the longsuffering and gentleness in a hallway at six in the morning are produced.

The command assumes somebody is carrying you

Here is the sentence that I think is actually missing from most of these conversations.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2)

One another's. It is reciprocal by construction. And the picture is of a load that more than one person has hold of, which means the arrangement Scripture describes is not one person carrying a household alone while everybody says encouraging things at them.

So it is entirely right to ask who is carrying you. Not as a complaint. As obedience to the verse.

And something has to be said plainly here, because it belongs on this page more than anywhere else on this site. If a person has reached the place where this cannot be done any more, where nothing has been felt in months, or where the thought of the next ten years arrives as something they do not want to be here for, that is not a spiritual failure and it is not a thing to carry in silence until Sunday. Say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust. In the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour, and calling it is not a lack of faith, it is the practical obedience of somebody who has run out and knows it.

You are inside a command that assumes more than one pair of hands. Galatians 6:2 is written as one another's burdens rather than as yours alone, and the Comforter of John 14:16 is the Holy Spirit, named as the one given to come alongside.

God describes Himself as a carrier of the old

There is a verse in Isaiah that is spoken by God about Himself and about old age, and it is not usually read at the right people.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4)

Look at the verbs He takes for Himself. I have made. I will bear. I will carry. I will deliver. Four, and every one is His.

Now put that beside the person in the hallway. The old woman in the bedroom is being carried by God, and has been for eighty years, and will be, and the exhausted person bringing the tea is participating in something God is already doing rather than doing it alone on His behalf.

That does not make the tea lighter. It does change who is responsible for the outcome, and it is the outcome that is crushing people, not the tea.

You are joining something God is doing rather than covering for Him. Isaiah 46:4 has Him taking the carrying as His own verb, and it is His Spirit who is described in Romans 8:26 as helping our infirmities, which is a word about a load being shared and not admired.

The one who received her was given something

There is a detail in John 19 that is easy to read as a burden and is not written as one.

He says two sentences. To Mary: behold thy son. To the disciple: behold thy mother.

Both of them receive somebody. It is not framed as a duty assigned to a young man; it is framed as a mother given to him and a son given to her, in the same breath, in the same grammar.

And that is worth holding onto by anybody who has been doing this for years, because the language a family uses about it is almost always the language of a burden being placed. Scripture's language, in the only scene where Jesus does it Himself, is the language of two people being given to each other.

I know how that reads to somebody at the end of a bad week, and I am not going to pretend it makes a night easier. What it does is put a name on something the tired person already half knows, which is that they are getting something in this decade that nobody who avoided it will ever have.

You are being given somebody and not only assigned to them. John 19:26 gives both people to each other in the same two sentences, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 5:5, that the love holding a decade like that together is shed abroad rather than summoned.