Guest Post by Stephen Lorance
On Good Friday, as we turn our attention to the cross and often attend to the “words” Jesus spoke from it, one saying recorded in John has always brought me pause:
John 19:26-27 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!”
Jesus’ appeal of forgiveness for his enemies, his cry of forsakenness, and the exclamation, “It is finished!” these have always opened up the richness of the gospel! But what are we to do with this strange, even difficult word?
I recently found John Behr’s insights in his new work, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology, and his appeal to the Fathers therein, as a guide to the profundity of this word that often attends the more commonly taught sayings from the cross.
“Woman”
What a strange way for Jesus to address his mom! We were told twice before (vv.25, 26) that this was not just any woman, but was “his mother.” Why did Jesus use this unique epithet? Maybe because he’s trying to remind us of a time when he used it thusly before.
The only other place Mary appears in the Gospel of John is at the Wedding at Cana, where she—like at the cross—is described twice as ‘the mother of Jesus’ (2:1 and v.3) but addressed by him as ‘woman.’ When the wine at the wedding ran out, Jesus’ mother came to him to fix the problem. And in 2:4 he said to her “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”
Is he being aloof or misogynistic by calling her ‘woman’? Or, is he trying to point us to the cross. Yes, at Cana he will perform a miracle and “manifest his glory” (2:11), but it is not yet his hour when he will be lifted up and draw all men unto himself (12:32) Yes, he is at a wedding banquet, but this is not yet the beginning of the feast where “on the mountain, the LORD will make a feast for all peoples of well-aged wine” (Isa. 25:6) Yes, at Cana he will turn the water into wine, but he has not yet given the true wine—his blood, the “true drink,” by which we abide in him and so have eternal life (Jn 6:53-56)
As Irenaeus wrote in the mid 100’s,
With him is nothing incomplete or out of due season, just as with the Father there is nothing incongruous. For all these things were foreknown by the Father; but the Son works them out at the proper time in perfect order and sequence. This was the reason why, when Mary was urging Him on to perform the wonderful miracle of the wine, and was desirous before the time to partake the cup which recapitulates the suffering of Christ, checking her untimely haste said, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come’—waiting for that hour which was foreknown by the Father. (Adv. Haer 3.16.7)
Now at the cross when ‘his hour’ has come, the true wedding feast has begun and he provides the true “good wine.” Not as at Cana from the jars of our purification (2:6), symbolizing the Law, but now from the pierced side of our Lord, where water and blood flow mingled down.
“Behold your Son”
John’s gospel shows Jesus as expressly active. Jesus reminds, “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.” (10:18) Even on the cross when we often portray him as his weakest, Jesus doesn't just passively exhale the Spirit. No! The Greek verb is active! He hands it over (19:30; paradoken).[1] And it is not just a spirit; the Greek gives us the definite article—it is the Spirit!
So it is with this word that Jesus is not only tidying up his last will and testament, discharging his filial duty. Instead, as John Behr notes, “Elevated from the earth, Jesus, again, actively declines his head and hands down the Spirit from above…enabling the disciple to put on the identity of a son of God, born by the Spirit ‘from above.’” (Behr, 184)
This is bringing the prologue full circle! This is “finishing,” “perfecting,” “completing” (tetelesthai) the Father’s will: “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (1:12) Children, as Jesus later reminds Nicodemus, “born of water and the Spirit” (3:6)
Origen of Alexandria, writing in the early 200’s, speaks of this word from the cross, saying,
We might dare say, then, that the Gospels are the firstfruits of all Scriptures, but that the firstfruits of the Gospels is that according to John, whose meaning no one can understand who has not leaned on Jesus’ breast nor received Mary from Jesus to be his mother also. But he who would be another John must also become such as John, to be shown to be Jesus, so to speak. For Jesus says to his mother, ‘Behold your son’ and not ‘Behold, this man is also your son,’ as he has said equally, ‘Behold, this is Jesus whom you bore.’ For indeed everyone who has (come to Christ) no longer lives, but Christ lives in him [cf. Gal. 2:20], and since Christ lives in him, it is said of him to Mary, ‘Behold your son,’ the Christ. (Comm John, 1.23)
With these words Jesus is, as John Behr notes, “introducing the disciple into his own familial intimacy and identity, and so creating a space where the Spirit can dwell and Christ’s body can be established on earth.” (Behr, 183)
After Jesus’ ascension, where is his body? Yes, at the right hand of the Father in Glory. But also on earth: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27).
So now, today, how can we see him? Through His people—joined with Him and united together by His Spirit as they gather at the foot of the cross, worshipping the Father through the Son who is lifted up, and when they join together to eat at His table, participating in the body and blood of Christ—one loaf, one body (1 Cor. 10).
And what does it mean to be his body? Just as he looks down from the cross and tells the apostle John, “Behold, your mother,” to be Christ’s body means that we understand our church as the household of God, the family of faith. That we understand one another, and care for one another, as our very flesh and blood.
That we consider each other as more significant than ourselves. That we look not only to our own interest but also to the interest of others. That we live out the same mind among ourselves that is ours in Christ Jesus, who humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
When today we turn on our TV’s, or even look across our own street and see pain, suffering, and death. May we turn our eyes to the Son of God, the One lifted up upon the tree, and hear and live out today, especially on this day, this “other word” of Jesus:
“Behold, your son”—we are sons of God, joined with Christ by His Spirit of adoption (Rom. 8:9-17).
“Behold, your mother”—we are the body of Christ, giving our lives in care of one another in humility, sacrifice, and love.
Stephen is the pastor at Green Hills Community Church in Nashville, TN and a PhD student in theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Rachel, have two kids.
— —
[1] Behr notes, “The objection is often made that it is only later, in 20:22, that the Spirit is in fact given. However, this is to overlook, first, that in 20:22 he emphasis is on the disciples receiving the Spirit, and, second, the unity of the paschal event…which must nevertheless be narratively told, yet remain a unity even when doing so; as Ashton Fourth Gospel, 348, puts it: ‘the expression (handed over the Spirit) allows him to fuse Easter and Pentecost as well, hinting that there is no need to think of the latter as a distinct and separate event’” (Behr, 135, fn. 1)