The Taipei Times ran a story in 2002 about the love of a mother and a son. The report said that in 1972 a two-year-old Chinese boy, Hu Jen-chuan, fell from a table and went into a coma. When he woke up after six days he was not able to talk or move. Like any parent, his mother, Liu Kuei-lan, was terribly distressed. Yet her distress was multiplied by the fact that she could not afford to place him in an assisted living facility. Instead, she cared for her son herself. And this care showed the unfathomable depth of her motherly-love. You see, because he was unable to move, Hu Jen-chuan got terrible bed-sores and stiff muscles. So, for the thirty years before this article was written, his mother did the unbelievable – she carried her son on her back. As of May 2002, Liu Kuei-lan was 65 years old and weighed a mere 88 pounds. Her son, now a grown man, weighed 180 pounds. On many occasions Liu fell and fractured bones while carrying her son. Yet she continued to carry him. When asked how she could do everything she did, her reply was simple: “He’s not heavy, he’s my son.”
The title of this sermon could’ve been “waiting room” because I wrote it while sitting in a hospital waiting room waiting for my own mother to come out of surgery. No matter what happened with my mother during her heart surgery, I wanted to be there and share the pain and share the fear and share the struggle. And I feel like that’s what we get in this meaningful scripture lesson this morning. This third word of Jesus from the cross is important because Jesus somehow, in the middle of saving the world, knew that his mother, Mary, needed a son in her life, someone who could hold her in her grief and support her in her loss. Jesus knew his time on earth was coming to an end and that the physical relationship with his mother would have to change, change into a broader one of unity and of spiritual family, one of holy adoption and a new expanded community.
As I was initially studying this third word, I thought that Jesus enacted a special love for his mother and despite his horrific crucifixion strived to take care of her from afar. But as I read it again, I began to wonder if Jesus was really concerned about Mary’s well-being? Did Jesus actually “give away” his mother so that Mary would be well-taken care of by the disciple “whom he loved?” Or was there something more to the story? I mean, surely this was a good thing for Mary to be presented to another son so she could be taken care of in her old age and not have to be shunned by society as a poor widow. But was Joseph really out of the picture? There are many good sources that say he was dead, but we aren’t sure. Did Jesus have other brothers? We know he did.
Preacher Leighton Ferrell asked the same question that I was pondering. He said, “Why did Jesus entrust Mary to John, the beloved disciple, and not to his own brothers? It would have been natural for Jesus to have entrusted Mary to her own family. The common response would have been: ‘Mother, your other sons will take care of you after my death.’ But that is not what Jesus said.” Nope. It sure wasn’t. So, this made me wonder if the physical care of Mary was really what Jesus was trying to accomplish in this third word from the cross.
We also don’t get a very empathetic Jesus either in this Gospel of John. “Woman,” he calls his mother. Have any of you ever tried to call your mother that? I bet it didn’t go well. It seems rather cold and disconnected to me. But that is what we get from Jesus in this particular gospel, right? In the Gospel of John, Mary was just as special as every other woman Jesus encountered. Because remember, this was the Jesus who began his miracles in this gospel by changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana (John 2:4). When the wine gave out, Mary asked Jesus to reveal his hand, to show what the Son of God could do. And to that Jesus curtly responded, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” Jesus addressed his mother as “woman,” the same address he used for the Samaritan woman at the well who had five husbands (John 4:21) and the woman that was caught in adultery (John 8:10). And we get this same address again to Mary from Jesus as he hangs on the cross. He calls her “woman,” which, to me, shows that this is not a special appeal to his mother as he was dying. She was just like everyone else.
And as much as we talk about church being a family of God and we claim to be brothers and sisters with one another, if we look closely at the life of Jesus, he really wasn’t pro-family. Remember in the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus was told that his family, his mother and brothers, were outside waiting for him? He responded, “Here are my mother and my brothers (his disciples, not his biological family), those that do the will of God are my family!” (Mark 3:34). And then in Luke 14:26, Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, sister and brother, wife and children, yes even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Jesus couldn’t entrust his mother into the care of his family because the definition of family was changing. Remember the Gospel of John says, “For not even his brothers believed in him.” Those that believed in his mission of justice and love, they were now his family.
You might think I’m denigrating Jesus by not making him a perfect example of “Focus on the Family.” I’m not disparaging his words to his mother from the cross. What I do hope we see is that Mary was special enough to be given over to the beloved disciple, to be the beginning of this new beloved community. Jesus trusted his followers to take care of his mother when he was skeptical of his other family members. Mary deserved the care of a disciple who devoted his life to Jesus and sought to continue Jesus’ mission in the world. And Mary would have a part to play. Her role in this story is beyond that of other “women” and yet she represents all women too. Duke Professor Stanley Hauerwas claims that Mary was not just another mother. He says, “Mary is the firstborn of the new creation… without Mary’s response ‘Here I am’ to Gabriel, our salvation would not be.”
Catholic priest and theologian, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, wrote a book entitled Mary: Mirror of the Church. Cantalamessa makes the interesting observation that the new Testament Jesus is often thought of as the New Adam, the New Moses, or the New David. But with all of those titles, he was never called the New Abraham. Cantalamessa suggests that the reason Jesus is not associated with Abraham is very simple – Mary is our Abraham. Just as Abraham did not resist God’s call to leave his father’s country to go to a new land, so Mary did not resist God’s declaration that she would bear a child through the power of the Holy Spirit. Mary said, “Here am I” when God asked her to participate in a special act of saving the world. Abraham’s faith called him out of his own country and to trust where God was leading him. And because he trusted God, we are all children of Abraham, the chosen people greater in numbers than the stars in the sky. And just as we are Abraham’s children through faith, so we become children of the new world inaugurated in Christ through Mary’s faithfulness.
Since we are drawn back to the life of Abraham through the “yes” of Mary, we also think of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son, Isaac. As you remember, God restrained the hand of Abraham so that he would not kill his son. But as we have seen in the first two words of Jesus from the cross, “Father, forgive them” and “Today, you will be with me in paradise,” the relationship of Jesus to God, Son to Father, feels complicated and mysterious. And although Isaac was spared, Jesus would not be. Jesus showed what true love was by dying for his friends. And Mary would now have a new son, the beloved disciple, a son that would take her in and care for her. That’s why Jesus said, “Behold your son” or “here is your son.”
But I think his command for his mother to behold this new son, this beloved disciple, was also a plea for her to behold her current son on the cross as well. “Woman, behold your son or Mary, look at your son” beckons Mary to look up and see her true son, the savior of the world. Jesus called for her to see the big plan of God to shut forever the jaws of death and to bring justice into the world through a sacrificial love. “Woman, here is your son! Look to me. See what God is doing to fix this world. See the piercings and the pain. See the stripes and the shame. See the stripped down and beat up Savior, your son. Behold! See that the one born of your body is now birthing a new movement of God’s spirit that will bring love into this broken world, that will save the world. Behold!”
Early church mystic Gregory of Nyssa said, “If one examines this mystery, one will prefer to say not that his death was a consequence of his birth, but that the birth was undertaken so that he could die.” According to Gregory and other Christian mystics, Abraham’s “Here I am” to the voice of God to sacrifice his son, did not result in Isaac’s death. Mary’s “Here I am,” however, could not save her son from being the one born to die on a cross. Hauerwas believes that “Woman, behold your son” has more power when directed at himself on the cross than directed at the beloved disciple. He says, “Jesus’ ‘behold your son’ asked Mary to witness the [sacrifice] of the Son, to enter the darkness that is the cross, yet to hold fast to the promises she had received from the Spirit that this is the one who will scatter the proud, bring down the powerful from their thrones, fill the hungry with good things, and fulfill the promises made to Abraham and his descendants… her son, the Messiah, will do all this from the cross.”
But even so, as the focus on who the son actually was shifted from Jesus to the beloved disciple, we are meant to see the circle of those adopted into the family of God grow larger. Jesus charged the beloved disciple to regard Mary as his own. And Jesus, today, charges us to grow our new family wide, to bring others into a family of faith, a faith that goes all the way back to Abraham and to those first words of “Lord, here I am.” And we too, in this Lent, as we are also at the foot of the cross… we too say to God, “Here I am! Here I am to bring others into this family of faith! Here I am to say I am yours and you are mine! Here I am to lean into the mystery of salvation and the mystery of faith! Here I am to follow your commands to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the traveler! Here I am, Lord! Let it be with me according to your will.”
We echo those humble words of Mary as we travel through Lent. We too say, “Here I am,” because Mary’s relationship with Jesus and the passing off of this new Eve, Mary, to a new family, has ushered in a new reality. Augustine observed that the God who created us without us refuses to save us without us. That is why this word is so important. Mary’s role in our faith is crucial to how we treat each other today. Mary revealed to us that God keeps God’s promises to God’s people. And Jesus’ bodily struggle on the cross reminds us today that we are a bodily people who follow our matriarch Mary, the one who said, “Here I am.”
However, the bitter reward that Mary got for boldly following God was for her divine son to disown her and call her woman. But Jesus called her woman, not mother, not out of any disrespect to her, but because mother would have been an emotionally cutting word to her as she was wounded with grief. He directed her to look upon John as her son: “Behold him as your son, who stands there by you, and be as a mother to him.” She was no longer his mother, she was now only a woman. She was now the mother of the beloved disciple and, in my opinion, of the whole church, of all us. As followers of Jesus we were and are now birthed into a wider family of God.
In fact, one commentator thought that Jesus commanded the adopting disciple, this beloved disciple, to regard Mary as a woman, no longer Jesus’ mother, so that the reader could recognize that Mary was now becoming John’s mother and that we are all a community of joined believers with Mary as “our mother” too. Mary is all of our mother. She is one of us just as each of us is included in the family of God. Since the distance between Mary and us grew small on that hill, we must know that the distance between us creatures and our Creator is also very small. In Augustine’s words, “Holy is Mary, blessed is Mary, but the Church is more important than the Virgin Mary. Why is this so? Because Mary is part of the church, a holy and excellent member, above all others but, nevertheless, a member of the whole body. And if she is a member of the whole body, doubtlessly the body is more important than [one] member of the body.”
And so, Jesus entrusted his mother, her physical welfare and spiritual well-being, to a fellowship of loyal and loving friends, to a beloved community, to the next healthy body of Christ since his physical body was now hanging broken on the cross. And I think that this third word of Jesus tells us today that the adopted family of God is on full display in this last word from the cross and we must realize that we are connected to one another, that we need and depend on each other. When someone is in pain, we all hurt. When someone cries, we are all sad. When someone rejoices, we are all joyful. When someone is broken, we all turn to the cross where a broken Jesus said that we belong to one another. So, church, behold your son. Behold your mother. Behold your father. Behold your daughter. Behold.
Amen.