The Spiritual Motherhood of Mary

“Linked in the text to the problem of Jesus’ hour, the question of the relationship between Jesus and His mother remains open until the hour is fulfilled. The answer given at Cana is only the beginning of an answer, because Cana […] is not the hour of Jesus, except in an initial sense. Since the hour, in the full sense, is that of the glorifying passion, it is at this hour that the question will arise in its most radical form. Indeed, ‘the mother of Jesus’ then reappears, and only then, in the Fourth Gospel (19:25-27)”. Jesus, at the moment of His death, turns to her once more and again calls her “woman”.

At Cana, Mary passes from the role of mother of Jesus according to the flesh to the role of spiritual mother of the faithful. On Calvary we find the same question: Mary becomes the mother of the disciple.

The spiritual motherhood of Mary is the eschatological fulfillment of the motherhood of Zion, a theme found in the Jewish tradition (cf. Serra: Contributi dell’antica letteratura giudaica 100, 405-406, 414-415). The title “mother” applied to Israel is very rare in the OT. Nevertheless, the idea of the motherhood of the people of God recurs several times. Perhaps the most important text is Psalm 87: Zion will be the homeland of all, and each one who belongs to the people of God will be able to say: “There I was born”, even if he comes from Egypt, from Babylon, or from Asia Minor. Spiritually, every man was born there.

Jesus’ words to Mary, “Behold, your son” (v. 26b), seem to echo the prophetic announcement to mother Zion, who sees her children return from exile (cf. Is 60:4-5; Jer 31:3-14; Bar 4:37; 5; etc.) to constitute the new people of God, the messianic people. “Jerusalem was the universal mother of the scattered, gathered in the temple that stood within her walls. The mother of Jesus is the universal mother of the scattered children of God, united in the person of Christ” (Serra, Maria a Cana e presso la croce 100).

John seems to see in the person of Mary, in the Woman who personifies the Daughter of Zion, around whom all her children are gathered, the fulfillment of Caiaphas’ prophecy: “Jesus was to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into unity the scattered children of God” (Jn 11:52).

The text literally says: “To gather them into one” (in the neuter, eis tén). This “single” place where the divided children of God are gathered is probably Jesus Himself on the cross. It is in Him and around Him that the unity of all who believe in Him and who “look” upon His pierced side (19:37) is brought about. […] these persons are Mary and the disciple whom Jesus loved: in their symbolic function they represent here the whole new people of God (de la Potterie, Maria nel mistero dell’alleanza 233).

“Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (Jn 19:25), and Jesus, “seeing his mother, and beside her the disciple whom he loved”, addresses first the one and then the other, and from the cross “binds His mother to the beloved disciple as a mother to her son. The evangelist adds: ‘After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said…’ (19:28). By binding the mother to the disciple, Jesus accomplishes the work that the Father entrusted to Him” (Stock, Maria, la Madre del Signore, nel Nuovo Testamento 93).

Mary is proclaimed by Jesus “Mother” of all the faithful, represented in the person of the disciple, who follows the Master all the way to the cross: a motherhood no longer physical, but spiritual. “From that hour, concludes Jn 19:27, the disciple took her into what was his own (eis tà ídia)”. Ta ídia in itself means “what is good”, with a scope that can be very broad. The same expression is found in John’s Prologue: “Venne eis tà ídia (and his own did not receive him)” (Jn 1:11). It is a matter of a welcoming in faith, says I. de la Potterie: he welcomed her “into his interior life, into his life of faith”. This interiority of the disciple is nothing other than his readiness to open himself in faith to Jesus’ last words and to carry out His spiritual testament, becoming a son of the mother of Jesus and welcoming her as mother into his life as a disciple: the mother of Jesus is now also his mother (de la Potterie, Maria nel mistero dell’alleanza 245).

If the Baptist believed that the Messiah would come as the bridegroom to renew the marriage with the bride, that is, the contemporary people of Israel, then that people, once duly prepared, would have received the bridegroom with joy. John the Evangelist deepens the Baptist’s messianic idea, broadens it, and corrects it, showing that there will be a rejection and a tragic death before the marriage is consummated. Alonso Schökel completes and enriches the ecclesiological meaning of Jn 19:26, following up on the indication offered by Augustine and Gregory in some texts in which “relations are established between ‘death, resurrection, apostolic ministry, episcopal ministry,’ within the pattern of the levirate, in a synthesis of Christology and ecclesiology, which in turn is placed in relation to the historical Jesus in the light of the Old Testament” (“La lettura simbolica del Nuovo Testamento” 69-71).

Augustine, for example, discussing the moral value of a Christian reading of Deut 25:5-10 (Contra Faustum Manichaeum 32.10), writes:

…What else does this signify, in figure, but that every preacher of the Gospel must labor in the Church so as to raise up offspring for his deceased brother, that is, Christ, who died for us, and that the one who is to be raised up receives His name? Finally the apostle, observing this not carnally in its prefigurative sense but spiritually in the fulfilled truth, is angry with those whom he remembers having begotten in Christ Jesus through the Gospel [1 Cor 4:15], and, rebuking them, he corrects them because they wanted to belong to Paul: was it Paul who was crucified for you? Or was it in the name of Paul that you were baptized [1 Cor 1:13]? As if to say: “I begot you for my deceased brother: you are called Christians, not Paulines”. On the other hand, whoever, having been chosen by the Church, refuses the ministry of evangelizing is justly and deservedly despised by the Church.

Saint Gregory follows a parallel line in a similar text (Regulae pastoralis liber I, 5), using another text of Paul. “The theme is ecclesiological, observes L. Alonso Schökel (“La lettura simbolica del Nuovo Testamento” 69). It is the apostolic ministry that Augustine applies in terms of the levirate”:

The brother dies without leaving offspring. Who will take the wife in order to have children for the dead man? The mother of Jesus has no other children. She is like Naomi when she urges her daughters-in-law to stay behind: “Have I yet sons in my womb, that they may become your husbands”? (Ruth 1:11). At the moment of His death, Jesus names and institutes a brother, a son of Mary, to whom the task of the levirate is entrusted: “Woman, this is your son” (19:26). If this explanation is accepted, the ecclesiological meaning is completed and enriched, being symbolically linked to an institution so important in the law of the Old Testament and, as such, esteemed by many Fathers (Ibidem 70).

Was Paul perhaps thinking of the levirate, L. Alonso Schökel asks, when he wrote to the Corinthians, whom he remembered having “begotten in Christ Jesus through the Gospel”? (1 Cor 4:15; cf. also 1:13).

“Augustine thinks so. The false interpretation given to Paul’s ministry recalls the situation in which the Baptist found himself when he used the enigmatic quip about the levirate. But in the intention of the Church, and already in that of the evangelist and perhaps also in that of Paul (Acts 13:24f.), it is something more than a quip, since it seems that one must recognize in it a constitutive law of apostolic succession, of the episcopal ministry, of the perpetuity of the Christian name” (Ibid., 70-71).

On Calvary a transformation takes place, and it is Jesus who takes the initiative. Mary is no longer only the mother of Jesus but becomes the mother of the disciple. It is from the dying Jesus that she receives this other son. “Her love for Christ must thus have turned ever more clearly and strongly also toward those to whom His love was directed. Her maternal love for Christ took into itself those among whom He was ‘the firstborn among many brethren’ (Rom 8:29), and the Mother of Christ became the Mother of Christians” (Guardini, La Madre del Signore 59).

Dr. Rita Torti Mazzi
Lecturer, Locus Mariologicus