STABAT MATER
Mary the contemplative must have reached her peak of mystical union with Jesus Christ by experiencing the terrifying dark night on Calvary. She had said her fiat long ago. Now her virginal acceptance and maternal response reach their fullest expression.
St. John the Evangelist, who stood beside Mary at the foot of the Cross, knew as Mary did that Jesus’ hour with its promised victory over the Adversary would take place there. John wrote: “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the Prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself” (Jn 12:31-32).
When she heard Jesus’ words: “Woman, this is your son” (In 19:26), Mary must have recalled the Cana wedding when she first heard herself addressed as woman. His hour had come. Because of her mothering of Him into His human existence that brought Him unto His transitional form unto glory and victory over the Kingdom of Satan, she was being called now into a new relationship with Jesus Savior.
Many commentators see evidence in St. John’s selection of words in John 19:26 that he was linking up Mary with the Woman of Gn 3:15:
I will make you enemies of each other:
you and the woman,
your offspring and her offspring.
It will crush your head
and you will strike its heel.
Mary’s presence near to the crucified Savior leads her into a new relationship both in regard to her Son and the children born of the Spirit of Jesus. She had been asked to surrender her “possession” of her physical Son when He called her Woman at Cana and began His ministry. She lived out that suffering that climaxes on Calvary. Yet she too enters into His total oblation to the Father and breaks through to a new dimension as Mother of living.
Using the word woman, St. John links up the prophecy of Gn 3:15, the Woman participating in the defeat of the Serpent; the Woman at Cana (Jn 2:4); and the Woman standing at the foot of the Cross (Jn 19:27).
WOMAN, BEHOLD THY SON
Mary received on Calvary a new relation to Jesus Christ. Beyond the evident solicitude of Jesus to provide support and protection for His mother by entrusting her to His beloved disciple, Jesus calls Mary to look upon John, as so many of the early scriptural commentators noted, as now a son representing all the children of Mary’s new motherhood. Mary the contemplative grew in her union with Jesus Christ at the foot of the Cross to realize that she is now mother to Christ’s risen Body, the Church.
One of the medieval commentators on this Johannine text, Gerhoh of Reichersberg, expressed this common understanding of Mary’s new motherhood received at the foot of the Cross.
Next to her son, Mary is the beginning of the holy Church. For she is the mother of the apostle, to whom it was said: ‘Behold thy mother.’ But what is said to one, can be understood as spoken to all the apostles, those fathers of the new Church. And moreover because Christ had prayed for all those who should receive the faith through those same apostles, that they should all be one, so the same words can be understood of all the faithful who love Christ with all their hearts. What was said to the one, to John who so loved him and whom Christ loved more than all the others, can be applied to all who love him.
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
