Today, Good Friday, the Passion according to John will be read during the afternoon liturgy. We read those of Matthew, Mark and Luke once every three years, on Palm Sunday, but because John’s is read every year it is the most familiar. So familiar, in fact, that what is proposed here might come as something of a shock.
Who is the “son” referred to when Jesus says to Mary “woman, behold your son” (John 19.26)? The answer seems obvious, that it is the beloved disciple. Jesus says to Mary “behold your son” and to the disciple “behold your mother”. The statements are almost identical twins. And they carry an important theological charge. It is not just a question of Jesus making arrangements for his mother to be looked after once he is gone. It is rather that the disciple, representing all of us, is given Mary as his mother. She is being designated by Jesus in that moment as Mother of the Church.
But that seems to make the first statement redundant unless the “son” being referred to in “woman, behold your son” is not in fact the beloved disciple but is Jesus himself. This alternative interpretation takes nothing away from the significance already mentioned – Mary being designated by Jesus as Mother of the Church – but actually considerably strengthens its theological weight. On this reading, it is Mary now clearly identified as the New Eve, participating intimately in the work of redemption, who is given to the Church as its Mother.
How to arrive at such a conclusion? The key to it is the strong connection between Cana (John 2.1-11) and Calvary (John 19.23-20). The verbal links are immediately obvious. These are the only two places in John’s gospel where Mary appears. In each of them she is described as “the mother of Jesus” and is addressed by him as “Woman”. In each case there is reference to the “hour”, a theme which echoes through John’s Gospel: at Cana, his hour had not yet come (2.4) whereas from 12.23 onwards Jesus knew that the hour had come and it culminates on Calvary.
Cana is about good wine being provided in abundance to quench the thirst of a needy community. Calvary is about the Son of God thirsting and being offered nothing but sour wine. Cana is the beginning, the first sign in which he revealed his glory so that the disciples might believe in him. Calvary is the end, the final sign in which the disciples saw “the glory that is his as the only Son from the Father” (John 1.14, 18). Biblical references to an “only son” are invariably in the context of the death of that child.
The nuptial character of Cana carries forward, strangely, to Calvary. What kind of marriage is this, in which the bridegroom, the one responsible for providing the wine, consummates the relationship as he dies on the cross. At which point he does provide the new wine for he “gave up his spirit” (19.30), the dying breath of the Saviour being the same breath that initiates the new creation.
At Cana, working a miracle through his divine power, Jesus dismissed his mother whereas at Calvary, suffering and dying in his humanity, he addressed her once again as “Woman” and now took her to himself saying “behold your son”. Paul rather than John speaks of Jesus as the second or the last Adam but the point is clear in John as well. Through his obedience to the Father the world is saved and the consequences of Adam’s disobedience are overcome.
Just before his walk to Calvary, Jesus was presented to the crowd as “the man” (19.5), the literal meaning of the name “Adam”. If Jesus is “the man”, and Mary is “woman”, the teaching is clear: the new Adam and the new Eve are together in the moment of the world’s redemption.
At Cana, Mary had no part to play other than tell the servants to do whatever Jesus told them. At Calvary, however, the humanity he received from her is suffering and dying. And so in his hour, Herbert McCabe OP writes:
“Mary has everything to do with him. For she gave him not his divinity but his humanity. ‘Woman, here is your son’. As I see it, we miss the whole point of what John is teaching us if we suppose that Jesus is here speaking of the beloved disciple. He is talking of himself. Only then does he say to the disciple: ‘Here is your mother’ [‘The Wedding Feast of Cana’, in God, Christ and Us [2003] p.82].”
It is therefore from the lips of Jesus that Mary is first recognised as the New Eve. It was only after the fall that the woman was named Eve, up to then she was always simply “the woman”. Now Mary is the woman. It means that Mary is not just a spectator on Calvary. She is the one who through her motherhood of him made possible what is happening. So her participation in the work of redemption is profound, however precisely we are to express it.
The woman Jesus gives to the beloved disciple as his mother is therefore this powerful figure: not just a woman needing the care and protection of a man, but “the woman”, the New Eve, the one who more than any other human being participated with her Son in the work of the Incarnation and Redemption. It is this powerful woman who is Mother of the Church.
Jesus’s words to the disciple, “behold your mother”, also have much greater theological weight on the interpretation being proposed here. I first heard it from Herbert McCabe preaching his sermon about Cana at a community retreat fifty years ago. It struck me then and stayed with me. I have never heard anybody else making the same argument but I was not surprised to find the seed of it in Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on John 19.26. In acknowledging Mary as his mother on Calvary, Jesus is, obviously, asking her to recognise him as her son and to see what his “hour” involved, the hour in which her heart also was pierced.
Photo: ‘Crucifixion’ by Albrecht Altdorfer.
Vivian Boland OP lives at San Clemente, in Rome, and is the author of The Spirit of Catholicism, now available also in paperback (Bloomsbury 2023).
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