I preached this short reflection on John 19:25-27 on Good Friday this year, a part of a team who reflected on the 7 sayings of Jesus from the cross. You can see this as a more fleshed out version of what I imagined in “Mary, at the foot of the cross“.
Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:25-27 ESV)
When we come to this scene at the foot of the cross we are often influenced by the conclusion “And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.” It would seem that Jesus was making sure that Mary, his mother, was taken care of in his absence. However, such a literal understanding, the disciple actually taking Mary home, presents difficulties because Jesus was not an only child; he had brothers. The disciple was never named but traditionally we understand that he was John, the gospel writer himself.
It would be better to focus on Jesus’ words themselves and when we do that we will realise that Mary is at the centre of the scene, not John: “Woman, behold, your son!” His next words make it clear that he was not referring to himself. To John, Jesus said, “Behold, your mother!”
A simple reading of the text would tell us that Jesus was not asking John to take care of his mother; he was giving John to her to be her son. If this is so, then two key questions arise: If John is to be her son, then who should Jesus be to her now? And who is Jesus to be able to say, “Here is your son; here is your mother”?
Who is the man hanging on the cross?
There was already a problem in the past when Mary had taken on her role as Jesus’ mother to protect him and take him home. In Mark 3 we read:
Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
Hanging on the cross, Jesus was at the end of his mission, the mission that began when the angel told Mary, “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.”
Of all the people involved, Mary had the most emotionally devastating part: she would lose her first born son, cruelly executed on the cross, the son promised to her by the angel 33 years ago. And now Jesus tells Mary, “Woman, behold, your son!” this time not referring to himself but John.
The second part of the angel’s prophecy is now coming to pass and Mary needed to make the transition from seeing Jesus as her son that she must protect as a mother to Jesus as the Son of the Most High, the Son of God, whom she must worship and obey.
In my imagination, as Mary looks up, she sees her son with a crown on his head, framed against the heavenly sky, with an inscription that reads, “Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews”. There is nothing but deep love in his eyes, bidding her goodbye. This is the end of the journey. Then she looked across into the loving eyes of John, a blessing from her king in her deepest hour of grief as she hears his voice again in her heart: “Woman, behold, your son!” A new journey begins.