3rd Sunday of Lent: “Woman, behold, your son! Son, behold, your mother!”

Jesus emptied himself. Mary emptied herself. St. Paul writes, “Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” The Greek word for this self-emptying is kenosis, it is the surrender of all that we hold most dear and, for Mary, it was the surrender of her dearest. Long before they looked at one another on Golgotha’s place of strangest glory, they had been prepared by many little surrenders for this surrender by which all was restored. It was once put thus: “Once his public ministry had begun, Jesus had nowhere to rest his head, and Mary had nowhere to rest her heart.” And now it had come to this, she pondered in her broken heart, in her heart that by its breaking was made whole. That is the way it is with discipleship. The way of the cross is the way of broken hearts.

In all this, Mary was following her son, step by inexorable step. Her kenosis mirrored his kenosis, her life’s song was entirely attuned to his, a letting go into the vastness of whatever will be, trusting that at the end will be glory. Now his hour had come, and his hour was completely hers. At Cana, with a different idea of his glory in mind, she had tried to rush his hour. No more. Here, here at the cross, this is how it had to be.

Today and, for that matter, at all time, people find this truth off-putting. It is more than off-putting; it is a scandal. “We preach Christ crucified,” St. Paul wrote, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Some women say that for them Mary can be no model. They want empowerment, fulfillment, control. There is little that is new in this. Men and women—I expect men more than women—have always been scandalized by the cross. The way of the power and wisdom of God is not the way of our power and our wisdom.

To say that Mary’s way is not our way is to say that Christ’s way is not our way, for Mary was in every respect the disciple of her son. In all our promotion of empowerment, fulfillment, self-esteem and self-actualization, we should know what we are doing. We are rejecting the very heart of what it means to be Christian. “The disciple is not above the master.” “The first shall be last, and the last first.” “He who would find his life must lose his life.” “Take up your cross and follow me.” Jesus was relentless; he is relentless. “Do whatever he tells you,” Mary said. What she said she also did, and in her loss of her son and her loss of herself she knew “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Of course this business about losing our lives in order to find our lives goes very much against the grain. On second thought, maybe not. Maybe we have grown so accustomed to living against the grain of our humanity that we have confused ourselves about which way the grain runs. Maybe, if we follow the true grain of our humanity, it leads to our surrendering our all to the Other. Recall again St. Augustine’s “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Recall those old catechisms, both Protestant and Catholic, that asked the question, “Why did God make me?” Answer: “To know and love and serve him in this life, and to enjoy him forever in the next.” Why did God make me? If we get the answer to that wrong, we get everything else wrong. Mary, following Christ, got that right.

“Woman, behold your son.” “Son, behold your mother.” John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, is standing in for all the disciples, all of whom Jesus loves. At the cross, he represents all of us, the entire Church. He represents also the missing disciples, those who forsook him and fled, just as Jesus said they would. To John and to all of us, Jesus says, “Behold, your mother.” Therefore Mary is called “Mother of the Church.” As we never think of Mary apart from Christ, so we never think of Mary apart from the Church.

St. Augustine also writes: “Holy is Mary, blessed is Mary, but the Church is more important than the Virgin Mary. Why is this so? Because Mary is part of the Church, a holy and excellent member, above all others but, nevertheless, a member of the whole body. And if she is a member of the whole body, doubtlessly the body is more important than a member of the body.” It would be a perverse Marian piety that would pit Mary against Christ; so also we cannot pit Mary against the Church, for the Church is the body of Christ. Her role in the salvation story and her entire being is in devotion to her son. “Do whatever he tells you,” says the one who gave Christ his body, and she says it to all those who are, with her, members of his Body, the Church.

Mary is the model of discipleship in her total availability to the will of God. She had no business of her own. She was always on call. To the angel’s announcement, she says, “Let it be as you say.” She was dependent on others, on Joseph, for example, and now on John. By saying yes to the angel and agreeing to be the mother of the Messiah, she had created a situation beyond her control. Who was to pick up the pieces? God provides by sending an angel to say, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife.” Now at the cross she is once again alone in the world. God provides. “‘Son, behold your mother.’ And from that hour John took her to his own home.” In her total availability to God, Mary is totally independent and totally dependent upon God’s providing. True availability to God overcomes the fear of being dependent on others, for God provides. It is our determination to be independent by being in control that makes us unavailable to God. Little wonder that Mary is also called “Our Lady of Poverty” and is a model for those in the consecrated life who have vowed themselves to holy poverty.

Availability is letting God have his way, even when it brings us to the cross. For those who are available, life is at God’s disposal, kept in readiness for what he may be up to. All time is God’s time, what the Bible calls a “fullness of time,” a kairos.

Exploration into God is exploration into darkness, into the heart of darkness. Yes, to be sure, God is light. He is the light by which all light is light. IN the words of the Psalm, “In your light we see light.” Yet great mystics of the Christian tradition speak of the darkness in which the light is known, a darkness inextricably connected to the cross. At the heart of darkness the hope of the world is dying on a cross, and the longest stride of soul is to see in this a strange glory. In John’s Gospel, the cross is the bridge from the first Passover on the way out of Egypt to the new Passover into glory. In his first chapter he writes, “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” The cross is not the eclipse of that glory but its shining forth, its epiphany. In John’s account, the death of Jesus is placed on the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, precisely the time when the Passover lambs were offered up in the temple in Jerusalem.

“In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” declared the nineteenth-century hymn writer John Bowring. It seems a strange, even bizarre, glory. “We have beheld his glory,” St. John wrote, meaning that he was there, with Mary, beholding the final and perfect sacrifice. In the churches of Asia Minor that were founded by John, Easter was celebrated not on Sunday, as with the other churches, but on 14 Nisan, the anniversary of Christ’s death. This was his “hour” of glory. The resurrection ratified and reinforced what was already displayed on the cross. When John, therefore, places Mary at the cross, he is placing her at the very center of salvation. She was there, with him, beholding a glory different from, even the opposite of, everything ordinarily meant by glory. It was God’s glory, which is love.

Excerpts from Death On A Friday Afternoon by Richard John Neuhaus.