Friday Gospel Recharge
A Reflection on John 19: 25-27
(23rd Friday of Ordinary Time, Year A of the Liturgical Calendar, 2023)
Mary's role in our lives: mother of us all
There is this saying that goes along the lines of “home is where the heart is.” If you’re unfamiliar with its meaning, rest assure, I had to look this one up myself too. This proverb basically means that where our heart/ desires lies, there we find our deepest affection. Whatever your affections are, whether it might be for blueberry sorbet, Pokémon cards or company with good friends, there is where we find our hearts resting place.
One of our greatest hearts desires is to know who God is. Every human being - at least a plethora amount of times - question his/her existence and whether God is with him/her.. While I can testify to this existential phenomenon for myself, St Augustine once famously said “my heart is restless until it rests in you.” If you are in doubt that you question God ever enters your mind, at least Augustine testifies for all those who lived in his and before his time that God is something that troubles our hearts.
God, who is constantly at beck and call on our hearts, gently troubles our hearts to get our attention, so that when he has it, freely, we might keep our gaze constantly focused on him. This is what God wants from us, to gaze with total affection for him.
We can show this affection by praying to him, we show this affection too by observing his commandments which is to love God with all our mind and heart and to one another as he loved us.
Loving God with our whole mind and heart sounds pretty abstract. How does one do that in a concrete way? In today’s Gospel reading, God has included in our vocation to love him with everything we have by being a community that loves together. Our love for God and for each other should be united in the same manner as a family loves its nucleus community. A love that isolates back and forth, not just simply a stoic kind of love.
We say this for two reasons. The first is grounded in what Church doctrine teaches about who God is: he is a relationship of persons together in love. In God, there is a community of persons - three of them to be exact- that love each other, who love each other as a community of persons. Secondly, in the Gospel, Jesus shows us that to love God is a responsibility of the gathering of believers, whose love for each other should be communitarian in nature, with his statement: "Woman, this is your son... This is your mother.”
The beloved disciple in this instance, as biblical scholarship tells it, represents the gentile community being embraced and loved by God, while Mary the mother of Jesus, representing the Jewish community overcoming their cross of ever accepting gentiles in their fold as a chosen race of people.
So, we have it here: knowing, loving and serving God is home to our hearts; being gathered together as followers of Jesus that loves each other in community flows out of God’s desire for us, which means that being united as a community of believers who love each other in a communitarian way is a true human desire that seeks to be fulfilled.
There is also something else special about this Gospel reading. After Jesus charges the beloved disciple to accept Mary the mother of Jesus as his own, the text then says the disciple took Mary into his home. On the surface, this looks like Jesus is taking care of Mary’s social and financial business as he is dying on the cross. Of course, our Lord in his humanity was concerned for his mother and her welfare, however the text does not suggest this. Instead, this passage affirms Mary’s motherly role in this new family of Jesus which he established at the cross. She leads the community as mother of our pack.
We can speculate this special role of Mary as mother of the pack of Jesus because of our relationship to him. Through baptism we are born into a new life in Christ as God’s adopted children of the Father and also through this adoption as adopted brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. Mary’s relationship to Jesus however is not sisterly as ours are. She is Jesus’s mother and eternally enjoys her company with him as mother. Without her, Jesus, the divine second person of the Trinity would not have become a child, nor grown to be a man in human form, and without her we would not have been redeemed through his sacrifice on the Cross, meriting us with the gift to be called children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ.
Indeed, anything is possible with God, he did not need to have sent his son into the world to save us, however, as Aquinas suggests it somewhere in the Summa, that it was the most fitting way for God to save the human race from their sins, by becoming one of us, and dying for us on the Cross. Since Mary remains as the mother of Jesus for all eternity and we become Jesus’s brothers and sisters through baptism, Mary by virtue of the Sacrament then relates to us as mother. Therefore, we can call upon her as Jesus did when as a child, and seek her counsel, her guidance and her affectionate love us. Indeed, she loves us with the same motherly love she has for the Lord because she knows in the divine scheme of things that she has become the mother of us all.
If you don’t have much affection for Mary and would like to begin a loving childlike relationship towards her as Jesus loved and continues to love her, we can start by learning to prayer to her. Like Jesus in his youth, and perhaps in his adult years too, who in his earthly life would have required tenderly motherly love, as all humans do, just a natural fact, can call for her intercession, asking for whatever our needs are. A helpful prayer that is useful for fostering this relationship might be as simple as one where we pray intently to her through spontaneity. Another way is to develop a devotion to saying the rosary, and over time learn to offer the rosary for our needs and the needs of others.
Jesus has given us his mother because he knows that as adopted children of God, en route towards heaven, we need nurture and comfort which a mother can only give. Indeed, Mary does not save us, only by God’s grace we are saved. Thanks to Mary our mother and God’s own mother we can be called God’s adopted children and in some way we owe her thanks and our love for her for trusting God to be the bearer of Christ which our adoption a reality.
Home
is where the heart is. Ideally home for us is satisfying our desire to know and
love and serve God. God loves his mother and wills that we might return the
same affection he has for her. For any affection shown to her is affection
properly owed, since Mary after all reigns with her son as queen of all.
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