JESUS first avoids the mother-name. He does not say: “Mother, dear Mother”, but seemingly in an almost indifferent sense: “Woman, behold, thy son.” And only then He speaks to the disciple whom He loved: “Son, behold, thy mother”. But as regards Himself, there is no mention here of child- or mother-relationship.
This was not so only now. Already at Cana in Galilee, when He turned water into wine, He did not say: Mother, but “Woman” what have I to do with thee? When the people of Capernaum said: “Behold, thy mother and thy brethren seek thee”, Jesus answered them, saying: “Who is my mother or my brethren? For he that doeth the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister and mother.” Even when, scarcely twelve years old, He had remained behind in the temple, and His mother sought Him with care, it does not say, that He called her by the mother-name. Nowhere, in the Evangelists do we read, that in His public appearance He ever greeted His mother in Mary.
This can not be accidental, but must have been done with determinate forethought. He did not stand in the ordinary relation to her of child to his mother, but she, as redeemed and endued with grace, stood related to Him as her Savior. He did not believe in her in any such sense as she by faith was bound to her Redeemer. Endued with grace above all women in this, that she had carried the Savior of the world under her heart, she was deprived of what is so rich and so beautiful to every other mother; even the dependence, with which ordinarily the matured son cleaves to his aged mother. As often as Mary seeks this wealth, she is tenderly turned back by Jesus. He could not be to her, what otherwise a son must be to his mother. Here the tie of blood was lost in the tie of the spirit, that bound her to her Savior.
Only here at the cross, just before the “It is finished” sounded from Golgotha, it is the earthly tie, that is joined again in speech.
Had not Simeon in the temple foretold her, that once a sword was to go through her soul?
And now that it comes to this, that as one redeemed she believes, but at the same time as mother suffers, Jesus bethinks Himself of the emptiness in her mother-life which His dying would occasion, and so from the cross He says to her, aiming at John, who stood near her: “Woman, behold, thy son!”
They were courageous women, who from out the gate of Jerusalem, dared to tread the way to Golgotha, and to take their stand near the cross, at the risk of insult and mockery on the part of the bloodthirsty mob.
Peter had succumbed, even three times before Jesus had yet been sentenced; but Mary, and those other women, braved every danger, and with mother-heart fidelity awaited the last dying look of Jesus.
John they had taken with them, the disciple who by the urgency of love was bound most strongly of all the other disciples to Jesus.
First they had lived through that anxious Friday morning in Jerusalem. Not improbably they had early been awakened from sleep by John, when he had fled Gethsemane, and been worried by the tidings that Judas had betrayed Jesus, that the watch had arrested Him and had taken Him to the Sanhedrin.
Then what they did, whether they went to the gate of the hall of judgment, to learn the verdict, or whether they have stood among the noisy multitude afar off on the market square of Gabbatha, or that John went forth alone to find out what he could, and at length brought her the dreadful tiding, that Jesus had been sentenced to the cross,—the Evangelists do not say, and no surmisal can avail.
Neither does it tell, that they went along by the road, when Jesus was led forth to the place of execution. Only when the crucifixion had taken place, and things were approaching the end, is mention made of them, and then only by John.
First they remained unnoticed among the thronging multitude. Only at the last moment it seems, that Mary, when she saw death approaching, pressed forward, probably supported by John. And when, with a look expressive of nameless anguish and tender motherly compassion, for the last time she looked up to her dying Savior, Jesus also looked at her, and not too loud, so as not to rouse the mockery of the bystanders, but loud enough for her to hear, He said: “Woman, behold thy son.”
That at that moment Jesus suffered with His mother, as she suffered with Him, with the depth of His human fellow-feeling is not otherwise thinkable.
There was also refreshment in it for His heart. In Gethsemane all His disciples had fled, and in them there lacked the manly courage to comfort His soul, when it was exceeding sorrowful even unto death. Close by the court of the Sanhedrin Peter had denied Him thrice. And since then all day long His soul had been terrorized by the stare of angry looks, by the bloodthirstiness of the priests, and of the howling multitudes. Even while He hung on the cross, the roughness of the soldiers and the railing of the priests had been torture to His soul. All through those long, dreadful hours He had trodden the winepress alone. It seemed as though no single look of human eye was permitted to speak to Him of love and of commiseration.
And see, in the midst of these dark shadows, beams forth towards Him the love from a woman’s eye, the look of love from His mother and from the disciple who among them all was most dear to Him.
A glistening of love, as though to reconcile Him with that humanity, for which He was going to die. A refreshing in the most awful moment, appointed Him of the Father.
And still, a refreshing that could not be unmixed. For although with holy joy Jesus drank this draught of human love, at the same time His own love made Him fathom, what went on in that tortured heart of His mother. He knew, this was the moment, that ruthlessly the sword went through the motherheart.
To be mother, mother of such a Son, and then to see that Son, amid shame and revilement, dying on the accursed wood, O, even though for Jesus’ sake at that moment she held back her tears, Jesus has seen those bitter tears hide themselves behind the strained eye.
The sword, that went through her soul, was a sword-thrust the more through His own tender, finely-sensitive heart.
And therefore Jesus thinks not of Himself. Full of compassion His love goes out to this woman succumbing under her sorrow, and yet in her grief so courageously heroic; and more in a whisper than aloud, He says softly to her, but so that John also hears it: “Woman, behold thy Son.”
There lay in this word, if you like, also an assurance of the provision of a home. Also in His dying Jesus does not close His eye to the needs of this earthly life. Mary can not stay alone. The disgrace of the public execution of her son would haunt her. Who knows what anxious forebodings, that perchance they might even lay hands on her, and because of her son arrest her, may have filled her heart in that hour of terror. And therefore Jesus provides a point of support for her foreboding heart. Among the people John would protect her, as a son his mother.
And from that hour that disciple, whom Jesus loved, took her unto his own home.
But how much more there lay in that deep word.
With Jesus there is no trace of a love, which encourages any undue excitement of feeling. No moment do His feelings carry Him with them. He knows, that for Mary it will be the bitterest trial, to rise above the earthly tie, that bound her to Him, and from now on spiritually alone to be blessed in her Savior; stronger still; presently to jubilate in that self-same cross, the sight of which now crushes her motherheart. And therefore Jesus does not strengthen that tie of blood by letting the word “Mother” pass over His lips, but rather loosens that tie, by addressing her now as Woman.
And where in its emptiness and loss the motherheart can find no rest, there Jesus appoints her another who with childlike tenderness would respond to her motherly love; there Jesus points her to the warmest-hearted of His disciples, and from now on gives her John as her adopted son.
Tender, holy exchange of substitution.
He Himself dies as Mediator substituting for John, and John shall substitute Him as son to His redeemed mother.
Here is the mystery.
Mary, blessed among women, who, more bitterly than ever a mother, suffered for her child, and who, because her Child suffered for her, that He might redeem her, had to loosen the tie of “mother to child”, and transfer it to John.
And in dying Jesus loosens the mother-tie, and most tenderly binds up the wound in the motherheart.
So the mother who was stricken with grief, is comforted. From His cross Jesus shows His mother the two-fold grace: He redeems her through the blood, also shed for her, and into her motherheart He drops the balm of consolation, by transferring the love from her motherheart to the disciple whom He loved.