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September 24, 2023By Father Eric Banecker, OSV News
When we speak about the Incarnation, the reality of the second person of the Trinity taking on human nature, we can fall into two bad habits.
One is to resort to technical language, which, though necessary at times, can serve to obscure the sublime truth of this dogma.
The other tendency is to oversimplify to the point of incoherence. The Gospels offer us an opportunity to overcome this whenever we encounter the Lord doing something both profoundly human and at the same time perfectly revelatory of his divinity. We see this via John 19:25-27.
John’s Gospel paints a stark and poignant scene: from the cross, Jesus looks out upon a small band of friends amid a sea of enemies and gawking onlookers. Among those friends standing close by are two figures, “his mother” and “the disciple whom he loved.” These characterizations exclusively denote relationships to Christ. The woman is not “Mary” but “his mother.” The young man is not “John” but “the disciple.”
Then, at that most consequential hour of human and cosmic history, Jesus, the God-man, does something profoundly human and altogether mysterious at once. He says to his mother, “woman, behold your son.”
As the last act of an only child, there could be nothing more practical than ensuring the welfare of his widowed mother. In fact, this scene provides excellent verification of the theological truth of Mary’s status as “ever-Virgin Mother of God.” After all, any children of Mary would have automatically taken on the responsibilities of caring for her. That fact that she herself has no children (notwithstanding one’s opinion about the “cousins” or “half-siblings” of Jesus) is precisely the reason why someone must be designated to “adopt” her and thus provider for her care.
John is told to do just this when Jesus says, “behold, your mother.” Here we peer deeper into the mystery: the human necessity of finding a home for his mother is at the same time the spiritual be-gifting of Mary to the world, as Mother to the Church.
Every act of Christ’s earthly life is the act of a divinity who possesses an integral human nature. For this reason, paradoxically, the most deeply human actions of Jesus’ life -- eating, weeping, praying, turning over tables, dying -- also show most clearly who God is. The mutual adoption of his mother and the beloved disciple represents just one more example of this phenomenon: God sees to every detail, and we can trust in this.
Immediately after this, John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was “aware that everything was now finished.” On a human level, mom has a home. From the perspective of eternity, everything she embodies has been received by John on behalf of disciples of all ages. The last unfinished business has been accomplished.
“From that hour, the disciple took her into his home.” The Greek rendered as “his home” is “ta idia.” Its first appearance in John’s Gospel is in the great prologue: “He came to what was his own (“ta idia”), but his own people (“oi idioi”) did not accept him.” In taking Mary into his care, John does what those who sent Christ to the cross did not: he accepted Jesus’ identity as God-with-us and Word made flesh.
As the prologue continues, “to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God.” The beloved disciple, in other words, is each one of us, or what each one of us are called to be: a beloved disciple of Jesus, rendered by grace a child of God who then accepts Jesus’ mother into his home.
As the usages of “ta idia” indicate, “his home” is more than a physical space: it is his life, his own heart. He accepts the mystery of who she is as Theotokos and does so on behalf of all of us.
Just as Eve became the mother of all the living, so the new Eve -- through this divine-human act of entrustment -- is forever the mother of all who live in Christ, who acknowledge her son as savior of the world.