The Third Word

“Woman, behold thy son!”… “Behold thy mother!” John 19:26-27

In spite of the current presumption that Christianity is important for no other reason than that Christian are pro-family people, it must be admitted that none of the Gospels portray Jesus as family-friendly. In Mark, when he is told that his mother and brothers are “outside asking for [him],” Jesus responds, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:34-35). Nor should we forget that in Luke 14:26 Jesus says that “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot by my disciple.” In our desire to make Jesus “normal,” a man who liked children, we are tempted to forget that Jesus never married or had children. That he welcomed the children to come to him as manifestations of the kingdom may be for no other reason than that children do not have children.

I do not call attentions to Jesus’s anti-family remarks to denigrate his address to Mary from the cross. Indeed I think we can only appreciate Jesus’s commending Mary to the beloved disciple, as well as his charge to the disciple to regard Mary as his mother, when we recognize that Mary is not just another mother. Rather, Mary is the firstborn of the new creation. Without Mary’s response “Here I am” to Gabriel, our salvation would not be. Raniero Cantalamessa quite rightly, therefore, entitled his book on Mark, Mary: Mirror of the Church.

Cantalamessa, moreover, makes the fascinating observation that in the New Testament Jesus is often designated or assumed to be the new Adam, the new Moses, or the new David, but he is 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. Abraham’s faith foreshadows Mary’s “Here am I” because just as we are Abraham’s children through faith, so we become children of the new age inaugurated in Christ through Mary’s faithfulness.

—from Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words by Stanley Hauerwas