After the morning spent in Ephesus, remembering the Council that took place there and the title of Theotokos, Mother of God, that was given to Mary, we are now in her house. The Council was held in a church that had previously been dedicated to her, perhaps specifically to recall her stay in Ephesus, and now we stand in the house where she lived: it is in fact called Maryem Ana Evi: the house of Mother Mary. It is a beautiful and ancient tradition that gives us the news of this, a tradition that has been so studied and in so many ways confirmed: we like to welcome her today and think of Mary in this very place. Mary lived in a house. First in the house of Nazareth, then in the house where Jesus’ beloved disciple led her, according to what we read in John’s gospel in chapter 19, an episode that we know well but which I propose today to return to meditate on together once again.
Let us read the text:
“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.” (19:25-27).
This disciple, about whom the evangelist had already mentioned that during the supper he laid his head on Jesus’ chest, has no proper name. Tradition identifies him with John the apostle, of whom so many memories and even the tomb are found nearby, in Ephesus, but in the gospel, he is referred to only by the expression: “beloved disciple”, as if to make us understand that his identity is all encompassed in the fact that he is loved by Jesus. It is this quality of his that the evangelist wants to emphasize.
But it is precisely in John’s Gospel that we find written in so many passages that Jesus did nothing but reveal to his disciples, to his apostles, to those who followed him, that he loved them all: all of them were loved by him. He repeats it so many times, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you”; “Having loved his own, he loved them to the end”! We know very well that God’s Word is always timely and therefore these words, like all the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, are words addressed to us as well. Jesus himself tells us: “Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him also” (Jn 14:21). Here then we can identify with that anonymous “beloved disciple”. Each of us can give him our own name. The gospel invites us precisely to do this, to discover that that particular disciple who stood under the cross actually represents each of us. In fact, as we have just remembered -it is Jesus himself who told us- all of us are loved by the Lord.
All of us through baptism have responded to his call to follow him and have thus become his disciples: so not only can we, but I would actually say that we must identify with that disciple.
And if this is the profound truth that we have understood in the gospel text, here then we can understand even more profoundly what that text still tells us. For we understand that there, beneath the cross, we are not alone. Beside us is Mary, the Theotokos, Mother of the Lord.
The Gospel of John, the Fourth Gospel, we know this and we are realizing it, is a gospel very rich in meanings that we need, so to speak, to pull out of the text. You never end up discovering them. The evangelist has, as if hidden within the episodes he narrates, a deeper meaning and he helps us to locate it because he inserts in them certain words that, for him, have a special value.
In the passage we have heard one of these words is “now.” The evangelist says that “from that hour” the disciple welcomed Mary with him into his home.
The term “now” in John’s gospel does not indicate a chronological moment, any hour of the day. In our case the evangelist does not mean that “from that hour”,that is, from that first afternoon immediately after Jesus’ death the disciple whom he loved took Mary with him and brought her into his home. Throughout the Fourth Gospel the term “now” has a much richer meaning, we can say that it has a theological meaning, which directly concerns the mystery of God, the “now” in fact points to the Easter event. It is about that “hour” that at Cana, during a wedding banquet, Jesus says had not yet come. To his Mother who urged him to do something about the sudden lack of wine, Jesus replied to her, “My hour has not yet come.” Nevertheless, Mary made him anticipate it by obliging him -if we may say so- to perform the miracle of turning water into wine and thus -the evangelist writes- before the due time “Jesus manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him” (Jn 2:11). At the wedding in Cana Jesus, prompted by his Mother, anticipated the “hour” of his glorification. For this is precisely the meaning of the “hour” in the Fourth Gospel: the glorification of Jesus. Jesus looked forward to it with great longing and thanked the Father when he realized it had come: “Father, -so he prays- the hour has come, glorify your Son so that your Son may glorify you” (Jn 17:1). Jesus entered His “hour” at Easter, we can say: He entered His glory at Easter, with His death and resurrection, and in this “hour” He remains until the conclusion of history. It is an “hour” that lasts as long as history lasts, and during this hour, that is, throughout the unfolding of history, Jesus invites every “beloved disciple”, that is, each one of us, to enter into it in order to walk through it and become more and more participants in the mystery of his death and resurrection. Thus, Paul in the Epistle to the Romans reminds us:
“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Rom. 6:3-5)
So all of us through baptism have entered the “hour” of Jesus and are living out our story as the “beloved disciple”. But this also means that each one of us is found to have taken with him, to have welcomed –literally– “among his own things (matters)”, into “his own house” the Mother of Jesus, Mary, as we heard in the Gospel episode.
But in this episode also the expression “received her into his own house” –“from that hour the disciple received her into his own house”– has a special meaning. In fact, the evangelist has already used it at the beginning of his Gospel in the context of the Prologue where he speaks of the Logos, the Son of God. This morning we understood that this title is intended to indicate the divine nature of Christ, in fact immediately afterwards the Gospel will say that “the Logos became flesh,” that is, he took on human nature. Before announcing the mystery of the incarnation, however, when the evangelist is still presenting the Logos, Son of God with the Father, he writes that the Logos “came to his own house”and to those who “received him he gave power to become children of God”.
We know, however, that we are called to become not only “sons of God”, but “Christs”, that is, we are called to be conformed to Christ, the incarnate Son of God, to attain -as Paul says to the Ephesians- “the perfect stature of Christ”, thus participating not only in his divine nature but also in his human nature. We are all called not to attain the stature of the Logos who stood with God, before He became flesh, but the stature of the incarnate Son of God, as He is now and forever, after He died and rose again and returned in communion with the Father and the Spirit. Now, in the Trinity, the Son of God is the Incarnate, that is, He who is the Son of God and Son of Mary, as the Council of Ephesus proclaimed Him. And just as the Son of God in order to become Christ, to become incarnate, needed Mary, so too humanity, all of us, “beloved disciples”, after taking “into our own home” the Logos, Son of God, thus receiving the “power to become children of God,” must take “into our own home” Mary, the Mother who can make us “other Christs”. Until we take Mary “into our own home”, that is, into our own existence, we cannot define ourselves and be truly “Christs”.
It is she, in fact, who generates Christians, those who are precisely children of God and children of Mary.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, standing under the cross, received from her Son this new vocation. She, who had given “birth to her Firstborn Son” -so writes Luke in his Gospel (Lk 2:7)- under the cross, alongside the “beloved disciple,” felt called to a new motherhood: “Woman, behold your Son”.
Mary is Jesus’ ultimate gift to all of us, so that we can feel that we are his brothers and sisters.
And the evangelist calls her “Woman”, again using a word that suggests that her person is the bearer of a further mystery: that of the Church. It is indeed the task of the church to generate children of God. The vocation to generate new humanity is the vocation proper to the Christian. Mary, in her person, generated the Firstborn, the Head of the body that is the church, and now, in the time of history, as the type, the prophecy of the church, she continues to give life to the members that constitute this body.
St. Augustine wrote: “The virgin Mary preceded the church as her figure. How is it, I ask you, that Mary is the mother of Christ if not because she gave birth to the members of Christ?” (Ser 72).
And another great exegetical theologian whom I have already mentioned this morning, Origen, thus commented on that passage we are meditating on. He, while identifying the “beloved disciple” with the apostle John, wrote: “The profound meaning of the Fourth Gospel can be grasped only by one who has laid his head on Jesus” breast and received from him Mary as his own mother. The one who will be another John must become such as to be referred to by Jesus, so to speak, as John who is Jesus. For if there is no son of Mary but Jesus, and this, notwithstanding, Jesus says to his Mother, ‘Behold your son’ -and not, ‘Behold, this is also your son’– this is tantamount to saying, ‘This is Jesus whom you have borne.’ For whoever is perfect ‘no longer lives’, but in him Christ lives (Gal 2:20), and since in him Christ lives, when speaking of him to Mary, it is said, ‘Behold your son’, that is, Christ.”
At the conclusion of this brief reflection we can think of the question that St. Augustine addressed to the faithful of his Church and attempt an answer:
– Do we realize and, above all, experience that we are “members of Christ” and “members” who are growing to reach his stature?
– How do we experience in our daily lives that it is Mary Mother of God and Mother of the Church and therefore it is the Church who, as Mother, guards our fidelity and nurtures us and makes us grow as children of God and brothers of Christ?
