“Woman, behold, your son.”
Before the love of the Father was poured out upon the world at Pentecost, the love of a Mother was poured out at the Cross. At Pentecost the nascent Church was drowned in the love of the Father; at the Cross the nascent Church, embodied in the Beloved Disciple, was drowned in the tears of the Mother of God. Jesus, with what was nearly His final breath, nods His thorn-crowned head toward His Beloved Disciple and says to her, “…behold, your son,” revealing the mystery of His Mystical Body, of which John, by his baptism and discipleship, is a part. The earthly reality of the Church is born there on Calvary, there before our Sorrowful Mother, with sweat, tears, and water. As St. John Chrysostom famously writes, “The gospel records that when Christ was dead, but still hung on the cross, a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance and immediately there poured out water and blood. Now the water was a symbol of baptism and the blood, of the holy Eucharist… As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church. God took the rib when Adam was in a deep sleep, and in the same way Christ gave us the blood and the water after his own death.”
For only the second time in the history of the Church, the entire Church may celebrate this great mystery of Mary’s motherhood of the Church. As she was the Mother of Christ’s physical Body, who could otherwise be the Mother of His Mystical Body? And some might ask “Why does the Mystical Body of Christ need a mother to begin with?” To quote St. Joan of Arc as she replied to a question put to her by her judges, “About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.” Jesus had a mother; why would He deprive the Church of such a gift? Does He not draw us into His Church, His Body, to conform us more to Himself, that we might enter into Heaven by the same road He Himself prepared for us? Would not every Christian soul benefit from the motherhood of the very same Mother who bore and raised Him? We dare to pray to God as Our Father because we have been baptized into the life of Jesus; God is His Father, and thus God is also ours. By the same grace, Mary becomes our Mother; thus He says to His Beloved Disciple—would that we might all aspire to be called such!—these tender words, “Behold, your mother.”
In John’s Gospel, we first encounter our Mother in the Wedding at Cana, where her intercession won not only her Son’s first miracle, but an outpouring of the finest wine, this miracle signaling the beginning of her Son’s ministry. Here, in today’s Gospel, we see her again at the marriage of God and Man upon, as St. Augustine writes, the “marriage bed of the Cross.” At Cana, the headwaiter says, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now,” (John 2:10). Yet here, at this sorrowful wedding, her Son is first served “common wine” (John 19:29) before He, as a wineskin bursting with abundance, pours out the choicest wine from the vessel of His Heart: water from the Rock, and Blood which He Himself said is “true drink” (John 6:55). And she is there.
“Behold, your mother.” As Christ obeyed her, heeding her intercession at Cana, He obeys her still; He must, by His own law, honor her, for she was not merely a surrogate here on earth, nor merely a foster mother. She conceived in her womb, bore, and raised the Son of God, accompanying Him until death, reuniting with Him in His Resurrection, accompanying Him those forty days until He ascended into Heaven. She now sits with Him as Queen Mother, interceding for us, still saying to Him on our behalf “They have no wine,” (John 2:3) and saying to us in turn, “Do whatever he tells you,” (John 2:5). Praise God that He saw fit to bless us “poor children of Eve” with such a Mother as Mary! Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.