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• We are thereby instructed to take care of our own mothers.

Indeed, this interpretation goes as far back as Saint Augustine in the fourth century!

However, this way of understanding the saying has long been considered insufficient by many other interpreters. It does not seem to fit the theology of John's Gospel at all, nor does it seem to suit the concerns of John's Passion narrative. In all of John's Gospel, the mother of Jesus is mentioned only twice, and her name, Mary, is never mentioned. Because of Luke's Gospel, we think of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a very particular human being with a distinct personality, but that is not the way the Fourth Gospel portrays her. In John's Gospel, she plays a symbolic role. In both her Johannine appearances, here and at the marriage at Cana in Galilee, Jesus calls her "Woman." In English, this sounds very rude, but in Jesus' culture it was perfectly correct for a man to address a woman that way. For instance, Jesus addresses the Samaritan woman at the well in this fashion in the fourth chapter (John 4:21). It is not, however, the way a man would address his mother. So there is something more at stake here. Good Friday is not the first Mother's Day.

In the Greek, we are told that the Beloved Disciple, traditionally called John, took the mother of Jesus to himself that very hour, or that he—in a literal translation—took her "to his own that very hour." Various Bible translations say that he took her "to his own home," but that isn't in the original text. If you have been to Ephesus, in Asia Minor, you can see a house where John is supposed to have brought Mary to live with him after the Resurrection, even though there is not the slightest evidence of it. This interpretation is now generally agreed to have little or no foundation in the text of the Gospel of John. What is actually happening in this word from the Cross is much more significant for us on this very day than we might have realized. The saying is not about being nice to your mother. It is about the new community that comes into being through the power of Jesus.

We very often hear people say that they can be religious without coming to church. We hear people say that their "community" is their support group, or their social group, or even their political action group. Soldiers have their platoons; firemen have their firehouses. We hear people railing against "the institutional church," and God knows that the church has stained her own robes so badly that we can only repent in dust and ashes. But the Christian community has a quality that the critiques do not take into consideration. When the Christian community is working the way it is supposed to, people are brought together who have absolutely nothing in common, who may have diametrically different views on things, who may even actively dislike each other. The Christian community, when it is not grieving the Holy Spirit, comes into being without regard to differences. Personal likes and dislikes have nothing to do with the body of Christ. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

By rewriting the covenant in his own blood, Jesus has done something completely new. In giving his mother to the disciple, he is causing a new relationship to come into existence that did not exist before. The disciple and the woman are not individual people here. They are symbolic: they represent the way that family ties are transcended in the church by the ties of the Spirit. That is why Jesus calls his mother "woman" in the Gospel of John. He is setting aside the blood relationship in order to create a much wider family. A story in Mark's Gospel makes the same point in a different way: "A crowd was sitting about [Jesus]; and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.' And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers!"' (Mark 3:32-34). So again, we see that Jesus is calling people into a new relationship with him and with one another. It is not that he has no room for his own family. We are not recommending that anyone be like the missionary who is so frenzied in his evangelistic endeavors that he ignores his wife and children. What we do see happening here, however, is that mothers and fathers and cousins and sisters are newly created by the Spirit of Christ where there is no blood relationship whatever, and sometimes no obvious similarity or even affection. It is the new covenant written in the blood of Jesus.

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March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49