The Third Last Word: “Woman, here is your son,” … “Here is your mother” (John 19:25-27)

²⁵ Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. ²⁶ When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” ²⁷ and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.

Nailed to the cross and dying in agony, no one could be faulted for thinking only of their own horrendous situation. Yet, gasping for breath to speak, Jesus uses what little energy he has left to offer comfort to his mother. His pity is for others.

Jesus’ concern for his mother is certainly touching, but more is involved here. Jesus had formed a community of disciples – a community that fell apart with his arrest and trial. But in his darkest moment, Jesus brings into being a new community in the most unlikely of places. When Jesus gives his mother a new son, and his closest friend a mother, he begins this new community. It goes way beyond them for it is also our community: in a certain sense, even before the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the Church has begun.

Mary and John are the start of the new community of faith that Jesus is calling into existence. And this new family is born by the cross. The Italian renaissance painter Masaccio shows this well in his fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. We see the Trinity: God the Father at the top with Christ on the cross while between the two is the Holy Spirit, flying out towards us. According to an ancient Christian tradition, Jesus was crucified on the burial spot of Adam and so the bottom of the painting shows a tomb. But above the tomb is Mary, standing with St. John before the cross. She looks out at us and her hand points towards the cross.

Christians, as Timothy Radcliffe has pointed out, are all of the same blood, the blood of the cross. And so, Adam, the Annunciation and the crucifixion are all pat of the same story, that of salvation and the creation of a new family of God, the Church.