Song story: Mary’s goodbye

John 19 v 25 (KJV) Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.

We really believe the idea for this song came straight from God. As I [Becky] was sitting in a worship meeting one night, I wrote a couple of lines to begin a song which I felt would be Mary’s opportunity to look back on the life she had shared with Jesus and to look ahead to what was to come. It really was with these two lines, a sense of what the song was to carry and convey and an image in my head of Mary singing it at the feet of Jesus that we began.

What we really wanted to convey through the song was all of the ways in which Mary would think of Jesus: As the helpless child in her arms that she gave birth to, as the adult whom she walked with and learnt from, her personal saviour and the saviour of the world – and how these would all come together into this moment when she must say an earthly goodbye to Him. What a complete turmoil of emotions she must have experienced. I don’t believe that even given her remarkable circumstances, that losing her son would have been easy, that she wouldn’t have grieved like any normal mother. Would she have questioned God at that time? Would she have been able to trust that this was what was meant to happen? She would surely have known this day would come – but did that make it any easier? I can’t imagine so…

Some of these questions we will never really know the answer to, but in placing ourselves as much as possible in her shoes, it enables us to grasp a little of what she might have felt. As the song developed we began to realise that it should be a part of our Good Friday Easter production. This was a crucial part of the songs story, as this gave us a definite aim, atmosphere and context for the song. We began working on the song just after the release of Les Mis and I think we were probably influenced by this, particularly in a musical sense. It has been well publicised that during the filming of Les Mis, the actors performed the songs live, rather than to a pre-recorded track and the result (apart from awards for Anne Hathaway’s performance!) was a incredible enhancement of the audience’s emotional connection to the song,as well as a sense honesty, vulnerability and belief in the actor’s performance. We wanted this sort of emotion to be conveyed through Mary’s song, for people to forget who might be singing it and instead see Mary, all of those hundreds of years ago, as a grieving mother in front of the cross.

Good Friday enables us to take this 360 degree view of the gospel. So often we have a very simplistic view of what happened at Calvary, it becomes an event that happened many years ago and we consign it to history. We believed that by creatively entering into the character of Mary we would be able to get fresh insight on this glorious and horrific event that changed all history and all of our lives. Our hope was that we could, in some small way, capture the emotion, torment, liberation and story behind that moment in Mary’s life and in doing so, enable people to connect more personally with her story and Jesus’ death.

Written by;
Becky Mallaband
Tim Barton