Homily on 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!” And from that hour on, the disciple took her to his home.
INTRODUCTION
Did you know that when people are going through tough times themselves, it’s not always their instinct to reach out and comfort others? The natural disposition of the human heart is to prioritize self-interests. Because of our inherent inclination, we desire to meet our needs over others. Consequently, we are more preoccupied with the problems we have than with those of others. But Jesus set an extraordinary example for his disciples amid the insurmountable affliction he suffered on the Cross at the hands of Rome. According to the Roman orator Cicero, the crucifixion is “the cruelest and foulest of punishments.”1 Knowing the suffering it would bring, Jesus readily chose the Cross. The Cross, a symbol of agony, humiliation, and rejection, serves as a reminder of his immense sacrifice for humanity. This act of atoning work, where the Creator of the universe willingly endured violence, rejection, and abandonment, is profound. He allowed himself to be vulnerable and defenseless, bearing the weight of our sins so that we could have life—a life that is purposeful, fulfilling, and flourishing. As we gather to honor and celebrate his salvific work on the Cross, let’s take a moment to reflect on Jesus’ words from John 19:26-27 and consider what it means to be a member of Jesus’ newfound community and how we should live.
FAMILIAL PIETY AND CHRISTIAN LOVE
In the final moments of his earthly life, many deserted him to save their lives. The loyal few refused to abandon Jesus in his grievous suffering. As his breathing grew labored and his heartbeat was fleeting away, he looked down and saw his mother and three other women along with his disciple “whom he loved” beneath the Cross. Simeon had forewarned the same young mother that “a sword will pierce through her soul” (Luke 2:35). Driven by her love for her son, she stood there to witness his tragic death. Seeing his mother now, Jesus utters his last dying words, “Woman, behold, your son!” to Mary and, likewise, to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!”
Simply looking at the event on the surface, it appears that Jesus was entrusting the care and safety of his mother to the beloved disciple, thus establishing the disciple as a caretaker in Jesus’ bodily absence and also initiating a new familial kinship.2 Jesus’ words resemble typical, informal adoption procedures rather than legally binding adoption formulas (as in Tob 7:12). Even in his dying moment—a crisis in the history of the universe—Jesus showed sensibility to the needs of his mother. He did not fail to perform his domestic obligations as the eldest son. He put aside his agonizing pain and ensured Mary’s welfare. Jesus ministered to her in the process of dying a gruesome death on the Cross. His care for his mother sets an important example but not the main lesson for the church to follow: We must be attentive to the needs of our parents and honor them and support them in their elderly years, even during our trials. Jesus, in his role as the High Priest of his Church (John 17), assures us of his active involvement and attends to the needs of his followers.3 He never ceases to care for those who are in need.
We also need to remind ourselves that it is their love for Christ that brought those women and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” to Calvary. Their presence was not merely a passive observation. It was an expression of their profound love and desire to stand by him in his darkest hour. They sought to provide comfort and companionship to Jesus, remaining steadfast until the end of the harrowing spectacle of his crucifixion. Their devotion prompts us to reflect: Do we, too, love him enough to stand by him? Are we standing beneath the Cross or are we observing it from a safe distance?
COSMOLOGICAL VS HISTORICAL IDENTITY
In the above passage, Jesu referring to his mother as a “woman” does not diminish his family relations. Some believe that it was considerate of Jesus to address Mary not as a “Mother” but as a “Woman.” The son’s calling of a mother would have pierced the delicate heart of a mother even deeper into the soul.4 We can simply imagine the psychological and emotional suffering any mother would go through if her son were to be crucified. By calling her “woman,” Jesus showed grace to Mary by sparing her from the pain that hearing the word “Mother” would have brought. Some believe that Jesus deliberately chose to call her “woman” to keep her from the humiliation that the mob could have inflicted on her if they learned that the dying man on the cross was her son.
The central issue is that Mary must come to terms with accepting Jesus as her Lord and Savior. The pain would not go away from her heart for accepting the fact that God preordained this event to fulfill his promise. But she could be certain that the more she accepted the truth about Jesus as her Lord and Savior, the more she could concentrate on the redemptive meaning of the crucifixion. Her approach to Jesus must begin with faith, not as “the mother of Jesus but of another fellow disciple.”5 Mary must begin to comprehend that the cosmic identity supersedes historical identity in terms of familial relations, meaning that her relationship with Jesus transcends her role as his mother and aligns her with a broader spiritual family of believers. She must live a life of faith as a believing woman, disregarding the merit that she once was a mother to Jesus. We do not relate to Jesus according to flesh but relate to him by believing in him and his salvific work.
Additionally, beneath the surface, the Gospel of John’s narrator is communicating a theological message. Jesus is forming a new community around himself that is characterized by love. The new relationship forming beneath the cross communicated the “vertical nature of sonship, that he is the unique Son; the second part of his statement expresses the horizontal nature of this same sonship, that his disciples, including his own kin, have been declared by him to be a newly created family (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).”6 His selfless sacrifice on the cross brings forth new familial bonds and relationships. By using nonlegal adoption formulae, Jesus changed his relationship with Mary. He also changed the relationship between Mary and the unnamed disciple. In the foothills of Calvary, he gathered around him a new family as he was on the cross.7 Jesus is completing the formation of the newfound community gathered around him before he died on the cross.
The fact that his family members are present before the cross also suggests that it is the cross itself that unites his new family members in the same Father.8 This emerging community and new family embodies and demonstrates sacrificial love. A small group of disciples gathered beneath the cross demonstrates unity and transcends familial relationships within the transformed community, where all the disciples are considered one family and are referred to as “brothers” and “sisters.” Through his atoning death on the cross, Jesus allows us to relate to him as our Lord and Savior. Jesus hanging on the cross established this unique relationship with his people.
Footnotes:
- Marcus Tillius Cicero, In Verres 2.5.165, 168; Rab. Post. 16. Josephus (J.W. 7.203) referred to crucifixion as θανάτων τόν οἴκτιστον (“the most pitiful of deaths”). Cicero delivered this speech in 70 BC, prosecuting Gaius Verres in the corruption charge for practicing every description of theft and robbery and his negligence in the governance of Sicily (73-71 BC). Cicero presented an overwhelming amount of evidence against Verres for conspiring with a pirate captain, Heracleo, to plunder the city of all treasures, sacred and secular, privately and publicly owned. The evidence was damning to try him in the imperial tribunal court for his treasonous act of protecting the Heracleo by executing someone else, a Roman citizen, as a “substitute” while keeping him safe in the hideouts in his house. It is a gross violation of Roman law. During his trial, Verres fled into voluntary exile in Massalia (modern-day Marseille) before a verdict was reached. He, however, was executed by beheading rather than crucifixion during the political purge of the Second Triumvirate by Mark Antony in 43 BC. Pro Rabirio Postumo was a Roman financier accused of being involved in the extortionate practices of the Egyptian King Ptolemy Auletes. In his speech delivered in 54 BC, Cicero argued that no Roman citizen should be subjected to the ultimate cruelty of the cross (crux) or beheading (obductio capitis). This speech stresses the legal protection that Roman citizenship is bound to. ↩︎
- Andrew T. Lincoln, The Gospel according to Saint John, Black’s New Testament Commentary (London: Continuum, 2005), 476. ↩︎
- Charles Simeon, Horae Homileticae: John XIII to Acts, vol. 14 (London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1833), 181-82. ↩︎
- William Hendriksen and Simon J. Kistemaker, Exposition of the Gospel According to John, vol. 2, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1953–2001), 433. ↩︎
- D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 618. ↩︎
- Klink III, John, 801. ↩︎
- Rodney A. Whitacre, John, vol. 4, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Westmont, IL: IVP Academic, 1999), 461. ↩︎
- Edward W. Klink III, John, ed. Clinton E. Arnold, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 804. ↩︎
“What Would You Do?” — Simon Wiesenthal
For the readers, the context in this question is that Karl, the Nazi soldier who had slaughtered many innocent Jews, was on his deathbed seeking forgiveness from Wiesenthal, a Jew in the labor camp. Wiesenthal, a victim of Nazi hatred, did not suffer at the hands of Karl, but he felt he had to seek forgiveness from someone, a Jew, to assuage his agonizing conscience before taking his last breath. Simon Wiesenthal poses this poignant question to his readers in his memoir, “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness,” what would they have done if a perpetrator had approached them to ask for forgiveness?
This piece is my personal response, which comes from my conviction to Wiesenthal’s questions:
Reading Wiesenthal’s firsthand account of the cruel ordeal he had to go through in the Nazi camp was a harrowing memoir. A lot of details, especially the grim reality of life’s uncertainty, the depravity of the human heart at the core, and the supposed silence of God in the midst of the indiscriminate slaughtering of His people, depict a picture of pure evil. And the intensity of the question he posed to his readers unsettles their equilibrium.
If I were Wiesenthal, I would not have done anything different from what he did in the hospital. I would have simply walked out or, at the most, lashed out at Karl. Knowing that the Scripture clearly presupposes and requires us to love our enemies and forgive them regardless of their sin, my ongoing suffering is unjustifiable. When my conscience on humanity is bleak and, most importantly, God seems distant when I bellow in agony, the prospect of forgiving an abuser of that magnitude of crime is nearly impossible for the natural disposition of the human heart. I would have stood at the crossroads of whether to forgive Karl for the crime he committed against those innocent people or try to justify my position of not forgiving the wish of a dying man. On one hand, I would have liked to see the retributive justice. On the other hand, the gospel convicts me to seek restorative justice.
Karl might have looked at me as a representative of the collective whole, but I do not represent all my people. I do not have a moral ground to represent millions of annihilated people on my own right and forgive him on behalf of the perished ones in the gas chamber and in the “pipe.” I struggle with this conundrum that I symbolically represent the entire ethnicity from whom forgiveness was sought. Then, could I assume that Karl, who sought forgiveness, also represents the whole of Nazis? Of course, NOT. It is an individual asking for forgiveness for himself after experiencing a pang of guilt. I can only forgive him for what he has done to me.
In this case, he had not harmed me. Jesus manifested what forgiveness is on the Cross. He forgave those who hung him on the cross. However, nowhere in Scripture do we find that we can forgive the abuser on behalf of the victim. I would rather suggest Karl ask forgiveness from the One who can blot out all his sins. Forgiveness is a conscious and voluntary choice. If I were to decide whether to forgive Karl on his deathbed, when violent death is routinely looming over my own head, either in the labor camp or in the gas chamber, how genuine would that forgiveness be, other than to soothe the dying man’s soul? I would even doubt my state of mind if I were capable of forgiving someone like him. Thus, I could not have stayed by his deathbed for a moment but would have walked away.