By Rev. Adam Anderson
Over the last few months, as sometimes happens in life, I’ve had some significant self-realizations about how I view myself and how I end up interacting with others. And if any of you have had these moments, you know that they are not always enjoyable, nor are they easy.
The one thing that has struck me more than anything else is that I’m not sure I realized until recently how anxious a person I am.
I find that I am constantly surveilling the landscape of my connections with others, ever concerned that if I make a mistake, if I say the wrong thing, or if I turn out to be exhausted and can’t do everything I want to do, all those connections will fray and I will eventually destroy the relationships I love and value most.
What I’ve come to realize is that my nervous system alights over and over again, sounding a constant alarm of impending doom.
And it is exhausting.
It’s exhausting for me. But I also think it’s exhausting for others at times. Because when you’re constantly afraid that your missteps will cause someone to leave or abandon you, you’re constantly trying to make sure everyone is okay. You don’t rest. Enjoyment becomes harder to come by. Every day feels more and more like work to push away a fear that seems to have no resolution, provided all you do is keep trying to overcompensate for it.
It’s with that lens that I found myself turning to Mary this year.
For as much as we talk about her, I don’t think we know a whole lot about her. And so I wonder about who she is and what kind of anxieties she must have felt. Because raising kids is already hard, but Mary had the burden of raising Jesus, the Son of God. I’m pretty sure that would lead anybody into a state of anxiety.
In Luke 2, we get a moment where that anxiety is named out loud.
Mary and Joseph have gone up to do what they do every year. They travel to Jerusalem for the Passover, the festival ends, and then they start heading home. After a day on the road, they realize that Jesus isn’t with them.
So they turn back and search. For three days, they search.
And then they finally find him — of all places — at Sunday school. He’s in the temple, listening to the teachers, asking questions, giving answers that astonish elders who have spent their entire lives in study. And even in the midst of that remarkable scene, Mary doesn’t soften what she is feeling. She names it, as every parent would.
“Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”
Boy, you just about gave us a heart attack.
Mary is not being dramatic. She is twelve years into raising the Son of God. She fled to Egypt with this child to save his life. And now she’s lost him for three days. When she finally finds him, she names it out loud.
And do you know what she gets?
She doesn’t get comfort. She doesn’t get “I’m sorry, Ma.” Jesus says, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know I must be in my Father’s house?”
If there were ever grounds to ground Jesus, this might be the closest moment in all of scripture.
Jesus doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t validate. He doesn’t say, “Mom, I’m sorry I worried you.” He gives her an answer that Luke tells us plainly she does not understand. The anxiety goes unresolved. The fear is not explained. The pain does not get a tidy bow placed on it.
She walks out of that temple — still aching, her nervous system still firing on all cylinders.
And yet.
Luke tells us she treasures all of it in her heart.
This isn’t the first time Mary has been collecting moments precious enough to be considered treasure. Earlier in the chapter, as the Christmas story unfolds, we witness the shepherds breathlessly erupting about angels in the fields and how they had to leave their sheep to come see the Messiah. What Mary does with that story, Luke tells us, is treasure all these words and ponder them in her heart.
And twelve years later, Mary is still doing the same thing.
Treasuring is not some coping mechanism Mary invents in the temple to manage her hurt. This is a discipline she has been forming since the manger itself. Twelve years of taking what she could not entirely understand and keeping it anyway. Twelve years of deciding that a moment doesn’t have to make sense to be holy. Twelve years of refusing to throw away what she could not yet understand.
I think we tend — in a sometimes overly therapeutic society that is afraid of pain and anxiety, that reads those feelings as evidence we have done something wrong — to believe that the spiritual move is simply to resolve what hurts us. That we have to explain it, get past it, reorient ourselves away from the anxious moment toward something more peaceful.
But that is not what Mary does.
She doesn’t reorient herself away from the anxious. She doesn’t spend the three days home telling Jesus he should have apologized. She doesn’t simply fall apart at what happened. Instead, she holds the anxious beside and with the divine. She doesn’t stop being in pain at the temple. She treasures the moment precisely as it is.
The treasures Luke tells us Mary carries are not selective. She carries all of them — every single one. She carries the shepherds. She carries the fear of losing the Son of God. She carries the confusion left unresolved, and all of the days afterward in Nazareth. In holding every single one of them — the hard moments, the ones she surely would have rather avoided — every single one of them apparently ends up resolving itself, because the anxiety of the temple is just one moment surrounded by many, many others.
Even the hardest moments, Mary shows us, resolve into treasure.
And that rhymes very closely with the resurrection itself.
Here’s the thing about the three days she spent searching for Jesus in Jerusalem. Years from now, there will be another three days of losing and finding. Three days of anxiety and fear and wondering where Jesus is. And on the third day, Jesus will be found — and Jesus will be risen.
The losing and the finding. The same three days.
By the time we get to the empty tomb, Mary will have been treasuring for thirty-odd years. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think Luke is showing us how grace works in slow time.
The treasures Mary stored up when she could not understand them — the shepherds’ wild words, the temple confusion, the long road to Jerusalem — those treasures become the seedbed of how she sees resurrection when it finally comes. Resurrection’s site is built one treasured moment at a time.
The treasures don’t make the anxious moments any easier. They don’t make the cross any easier. What they do, though, is reveal in the fullness of time that God was holy in those moments all along.
When I look honestly at Mary’s practice, I see what I have been refusing to do.
I have been too busy surveilling. Too busy scanning. Trying to make anxious moments stop. Too busy overcompensating and performing and working harder and making sure everyone is okay so no one will ever leave.
And it doesn’t make the anxiety go away. It only exhausts me.
Mary is teaching me a different practice. She is teaching me that you can’t surveil your way out of love’s anxiety. You can only treasure your way through it. You cannot force the moment that hurts to make sense. You can only keep it — refuse to throw it away — and trust that resurrection’s site is slowly being built, treasure by treasure, until one day it is possible to stand at an empty place and finally see what God has been doing the whole time.
Because when I have slowly learned to stop and begun to treasure, I have found everything I was missing. Unconditional love — which I was too anxious to see clearly. The truth that what people have wanted from me was never perfection but vulnerability. Never overcompensation but invitation into community. In other words, all the things I had been craving and so afraid I would lose.
That is resurrection made real, in a way I had never witnessed in forty-three years of living. Not as an abstract moment a couple thousand years ago, but as a constant treasure to collect and to hold. A reminder that death, even a perceived death, need never have the final word.
Mary understood that from the moment of Jesus’ birth. And she is teaching us still.
I’m not asking any of you to resolve what hurts today. I’m not asking you to feel a little less anxious.
All I’m asking you to do is take a page from a Galilean mother who learned, over twelve years and then thirty more, to keep what she could not understand.
That moment you have been trying so hard to fix, surveil, or forget — the one that sends your nervous system into a storm — stop running from it.
Hold onto it.
It just might be the treasure through which God is building your resurrection site.