One of the old Saturday Night Live skits my wife and I still chuckle about decades later is Jane Curtin doing “Weekend Update” with guest John Belushi talking about “the luck of the Irish.” Near the end of Belushi’s wild rant about the “bad luck of the Irish” he declares, “One thing! One thing!!! They love their mothers, boy, oh they love their mothers.”
As we turn to the third “word” or saying of Jesus from the Cross, in John 19:25b-27, one wonders if the Irish, as John Belushi saw them, might want to claim Jesus as one of their own. The typical understanding, and I confess my own understanding for a long time, of this last word of Jesus is to see it as a demonstration of His deep love for His mother, a display of divine filial affection. Even in His dying agony, the good Son tenderly arranges for the care of His aging mother. As I have discovered in studying this saying further, all that is mostly true, but there is significantly more here than a simple commitment to human family.
In fact, as many others have noted, Jesus is not exactly a “family friendly” guy. He called several disciples away from their families, parents and even wives. Jesus’ relationship with His own immediate family is “different” at best. Like He does here from the Cross, Jesus at the wedding in Cana in John 2:4 addressed His mother as “Woman.” While not as rude as it sounds to our ears in English, it was not how sons addressed their mothers in Jesus’ time. And, of course, famously in Luke 8:19-21, when His mother and brothers come to see Him in the midst of a crowd, Jesus pays little attention and instead says, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Which gives us a clue to the “more” that is going on in the third saying from the Cross.
This last Word is often labeled the “Word of Relationship.” Planning for these sermons, I almost changed that to the “Word of Family,” but I realize now that would have been a mistake. What Jesus teaches us about family is consistent with what He did and taught throughout the Gospels. All of our relationships, including our closest human relationships, are transformed and caught up into a new “family” which is the people of God, the Church.
So when Jesus on the Cross asked Mary to regard John as her son, and the disciple to regard Mary as his mother, He was not just making special arrangements for the mother He loved. He was graphically showing us all how relationships in His new order of things actually work out. Biologically unrelated people brought together as children of God by the grace of Christ now have a whole new set of “family” relationships to enjoy and to which they are accountable.
It’s all very good news in a day when the connections of family are strained by distance and when the very concept of family is challenged and broken by social changes beyond any immediate hope of redemption. Those who find themselves apart from biological family or in biological family situations which are only painful, are invited into a new family ordered by the love of God in Jesus Christ. It was for this reason that Jesus said those who hear and do God’s Word are mother and brothers to Him. He was in the midst of creating this new kind of family on earth. And there on the Cross He subsumes even His own close relationship with His mother to that new sort of relationship existing in the Christian community.
This third word from the Cross calls us all to rethink our conceptions of family and to think again about the new family in which we will spend eternity. There is hope here for those who have been hurt by family or lack thereof, and there is challenge for those of us who are a little too comfortable in always putting family above everything else, including our commitment to the Lord.