Iron & Altar

"And from that hour the disciple took her into his home." - John 19:27

Brother, there is a man in today's Gospel and almost nobody preaches him. John is standing at the cross with three women. He is the only one of the twelve who is there. The rest ran, and he has every reason to be thinking about that, or about his own safety, or about the fact that everything he gave up three years of his life for is dying in front of him.

Jesus looks at him and hands him a responsibility. Behold your mother. He is not being complimented or consoled. He is being handed an assignment at the worst possible moment, and it involves the rest of John's life. He is being made responsible for a widow who has just lost her only son.

What he does with it is one clause: from that hour the disciple took her into his home. Not eventually. Not once he had processed things. From that hour. He took the assignment while he was still standing in the wreckage of his own grief, and he did the completely unremarkable thing of walking her home and giving her a room.

A steward is handed something that was never his and is answerable for how he keeps it. John was entrusted with a person, on a day when he had every excuse available to a man. The excuses were real. He was grieving, he was frightened, he had failed the man who was giving him the order. None of that got him out of it, and none of it makes your list of reasons different from his.

Look at what you have actually been entrusted with rather than what you have built. A wife. Children. An aging parent. A man at work with nobody in his corner. Those were handed to you, most of them without your asking, and the standard from today's Gospel is not that you will feel equal to them. The standard is from that hour. You take them home and you give them a room, in the middle of whatever you happen to be carrying yourself.

Name the one person you have been entrusted with and have been putting off because you are dealing with your own weight right now. Today, not this week, do the one concrete thing for them you have been deferring. Do it before you feel ready.

Lord, I have used my own burdens as a reason to set down people you handed me. John took her home from that hour, in the middle of his worst day. Make me a steward like that. Amen.