Reflections on the Seven Words of Jesus from the Cross: 3 Here is your mother...

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ John 19.26-27 (www.biblegateway.com NRSVA)

Who is the disciple whom Jesus loved? People have wondered whether it was John the Disciple, but there’s no indication anywhere else in the Gospels that John the Disciple was more beloved by Jesus than Peter and Andrew, or his brother James. Other people have wondered whether it was the author of the Gospel, but that would make him very old when he wrote the Gospel and the standard of the writer’s Greek is far more accomplished than a Galilean fisherman might be expected to achieve.

It seems more probable then that the disciple whom Jesus loved is every disciple, for Jesus loves us all, and we are all challenged to love his mother and become good brothers and sisters of Jesus. Meister Eckhart, a medieval friar and theologian, dared to suggest as long ago as the 1300s that Christmas and Easter are times when we are called to celebrate our rebirth as children of God. Moreover, he said, Mary is not unique. We are all called to be “other Marys,” or mothers of God in our own lives, ‘to birth Christ in our own work, our own being and our own personhood.’*

*Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations (New World Library: 2011), 148.

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