Woman, here is your son

“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.”
John 19:25-27 

We don’t hear much from Mary, the mother of Jesus, in John’s Gospel. Unlike Matthew and Luke, John’s nativity story omits her involvement entirely, focusing instead on the eternal Son who “was in the beginning with God.” In John’s Gospel, Mary’s maternal characteristics are underplayed. Twice, Jesus calls her “Woman,” which was culturally respectful but not relationally intimate. Is Mary not more than “Woman” to her son, whom she held and fed and nurtured? What explanation can we give for Jesus’s distance?  

It’s worth looking at the story of the Wedding at Cana for a clue. John tells us, “When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you’” (John 2:3-5). 

Mary’s statement, do whatever he tells you, encapsulates the message of John’s Gospel and the message of the Christian life. At Cana’s wedding feast, Jesus was not Mary’s son, he was her Lord. The only legitimate response to the authority of the Lord is to do what he wills, and so Mary becomes the first herald of the prayer Christians pray continuously around the world: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 

So, when Jesus looks over at his mother and his friend as he hung upon the cross, he calls out to her again, “Woman.” And this time, he points not at himself, but to his beloved disciple: “Here is your son.” Not the precocious boy who hung back at the temple to teach the teachers, not the man who turned water into wine, and not the mangled body hanging from the cross. As he hung dying, Jesus provides a new family for his mother.  

But, as the Rev. Fleming Rutledge writes, “Good Friday is not the first Mother’s Day.” It is a gross sentimentalization to interpret this saying as Jesus simply being nice to his mother. Jesus provides for her needs, to be sure, but it is more than that. By uniting his mother to his beloved disciple as mother and son, Jesus inaugurates the first familial tie that has continued for the last 2,000 years to form the Church. Jesus replaces the bloodline that united he and Mary with the covenant of his blood—a covenant that would make brothers and sisters from those who were once far off: Gentile and Jew, slave and free, male and female.  

And Mary’s defiant obedience to the man who was always her Lord before he was her son continues as she goes into the beloved disciple’s house that very day. “Do whatever he tells you,” to the very end, past the point of understanding, through the anguish of a mother who has buried her child.  

Jesus does not distance himself from his mother as an act of rebellion or rejection. His concern for her is clear in his final moments of life as he ensures that her future is secure. But his concern for us is also clear—those of us who have suffered the loss of a parent or the burden of infertility or the estrangement of a sibling. Jesus allows himself to become motherless so that you and I might experience his Brotherhood in the Church, united to him by his own Spirit. And what’s more, in establishing the family of the Church, he has also united us to one another as brothers and sisters, co-heirs according to his promise, members of his very Body.  

“The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord; she is His new creation, by water and the word. From heav’n He came and sought her to be His holy bride; with His own blood He bought her, and for her life He died.” Hymn #525, The Church’s One Foundation