The two other commandments

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s brief gospel (John 19: 25-27) shares with us one of the shortest and most touching scenes in the life of Jesus. The cross stands on Calvary bearing the dying Saviour, and those faithful to Him stand beside it. In one moment, Jesus both confides His disciples to Mary, and His Mother to His disciples. St John assumes this command not only spiritually but in the temporal sense and looks after Mary for the rest of her time on earth.

The two great commandments are to love God and to love one’s neighbour. These have been the bedrock of God’s relationship to His people since the time of the Old Testament. Now, since the Son of God has taken flesh and lived as a man, and as the people of Israel becomes the family of God through the New Testament, new relationships are formed, a new intimacy with God is brought about, and we find that Jesus’ masterpiece of grace, His immaculately conceived Mother, is made central to His relationship with those He has chosen. And this new relationship, this new intimacy, is lived out through two further commandments, one to the Blessed Mother and one to Jesus’ followers.

To Mary, first, then He says: Woman, behold your son. Woman here is a form of address directly translated from the Hebrew but missing its honorific value in European languages. Then: Behold your son; there is the command. Mary does not cherish us maternally only because she is good hearted; she does so in obedience to Her Son’s command, for she is always the obedient one. We speak so much of the active dimension of her maternity – of what we wish her to do for us – that we almost never reflect on her simply becoming our Mother, casting a maternal gaze of love upon her offspring, as she must do to fulfil the command: behold your son. Unlike with her First Born, she has brought us forth in the pain of spiritual labour, breaking her waters in a flood of tears on Calvary. And, nevertheless, she must hold us as her children, despite the fact our own actions required such sacrifice and pain of her First Born and indeed of herself. The gaze of Mary is not the soppy, cupid-lipped goggling of a thousand mushy pious cards; it comes through a blur of tears and red-rimmed eyes, with the faintest smile playing about her lips showing already the joy that stands on the other side of this present hour of sorrow. Not even our most terrible sins make her look away, for to do so, she would have to break Jesus’ command: behold your son.

Then, in this gospel, we hear a second command: Son, behold your mother. This cannot just be a wry remark; tortured unbearably and unremittingly in crucifixion, Jesus is beyond the irony of some of His earlier remarks. And, like all his earlier remarks, there is a spiritual significance in these words that opens up profound mysteries at our feet without our even realising. Jesus goes to the Father, but He does not leave us comfortless. His Spirit He will send, but Christians have long since known the comfort He intended us to take in this one figure, the spouse of His Holy Spirit, who shines ever brighter still in our spiritual landscape. Behold your mother who knows my heart, He might have said. Behold your mother, who taught me human virtues to complement the divine perfections of my heart. Behold your mother who knows best of all how to think thoughts of peace with God since her own peace with God has never been lost.

Jesus’ teachings are sometimes of challenging complexity, but some are as limpid as crystal clear water. Love one another as I have loved you, is one of these. Behold your mother, is another one. Behold your mother, for in COLW Mary is our model in everything that concerns the following of Christ. If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too, says the Lord, and who was ever more there with the Lord than the Blessed Mother?

In the end, that is because He chose her before the foundation of the world, and she responded with her ever-constant yes. To behold our Mother, to imitate her, as all little children imitate their mothers – imitate them in the most fundamental human ways while they are babes in arms, returning smile for smile before they have even stirred from their cradle – we only need give echo to her yes and add to it our thank you.