From the cross, Jesus gives his mother to the disciple beside her

CALVARY, JERUSALEM, the eve of a great sabbath — Jesus of Nazareth, nailed to a cross just outside the gates of Jerusalem between two other condemned men, spent two of his last sentences settling who would look after his mother. He spoke once to her and once to the disciple standing beside her. From that hour the disciple took the Blessed Virgin Mary into his own care.

Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, had sentenced her Son earlier the same day, about the sixth hour, on the eve of a great sabbath. Pilate said twice that he found no fault in Jesus. The chief priests and their servants shouted for a crucifixion, and they told the governor what the charge was: “We have a law; and according to the law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” Pilate handed him over to be crucified anyway, and his mother was at the cross where it was done.

She had been told, years before, what was coming. When she brought her child to the Temple at Jerusalem to present him, a man named Simeon, who was waiting for the consolation of Israel, took the boy in his arms and blessed God. Then he turned to the mother. “Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted,” he said. “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.”

Jesus carried his own cross out to the place called Calvary, in Hebrew Golgotha, just outside the city. Pilate had written the charge himself and had it fixed above his head: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. It was written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and the place was near enough the city that many read it, in whichever of the three they knew.

The soldiers who had crucified him divided his clothes into four shares, one for each of them. His coat was woven in a single piece with no seam, so instead of cutting it up they drew lots for it.

While the soldiers drew their lots, the Blessed Virgin Mary was on her feet at the foot of the cross, close enough to hear him. St. John the Evangelist, the disciple whom Jesus loved, stood beside her, and he later set down who was there: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen.”

Jesus saw the two of them from the cross, his mother and the disciple. He spoke to her first. “Woman, behold thy son,” he said. Then he spoke to St. John: “Behold thy mother.” From that hour the disciple took her to his own. St. Augustine, commenting on the verse, took “his own” to mean not a house but a charge: “He took her to himself, not into his own property, for he possessed nothing of his own, but among his own duties, which he attended to with dedication.”

Then he said he was thirsty. His mother heard him say it. She was not allowed to bring him water. The soldiers put a sponge soaked in vinegar to his mouth on a stalk of hyssop, and when he had taken it he said, “It is consummated,” bowed his head and died. His mother stood there until he was dead.

The bodies could not be left hanging into the sabbath, so soldiers came to break the legs of the three men and take them down. They broke the legs of the two crucified beside Jesus. Finding Jesus already dead, they left his legs alone, and one of them opened his side with a spear, and blood and water came out.

The word St. John used for what she did at the cross was “stood”. In a general audience on April 2, 1997 AD, Pope St. John Paul II said the word means to be on one’s feet, to stand erect. He read it as showing “the dignity and strength shown in their sorrow by Mary and the other women”. Her standing there, he said, recalls “her unfailing constancy and extraordinary courage in facing suffering.”

In its constitution on the Church, the Second Vatican Council teaches that the Blessed Virgin “faithfully persevered in her union with her Son unto the Cross, where she stood, in keeping with the divine plan, grieving exceedingly with her only begotten Son.” In his letter on the Christian meaning of suffering, Pope St. John Paul II wrote that “the dying Christ conferred upon the ever Virgin Mary a new kind of motherhood — spiritual and universal — towards all human beings.”

At Lourdes on September 15, 2008 AD, Pope Benedict XVI said the giving runs the other way as well: “Jesus presents each of his disciples to his Mother when he says to her: Behold your Son.” At Šaštín on September 15, 2021 AD, Pope Francis said of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the cross: “She does not run away, or try to save herself, or find ways to alleviate her grief.”

That hour is what the Church keeps on September 15 each year. In his exhortation on devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Pope Paul VI called the day a fitting occasion for venerating “His suffering Mother,” together with the Son lifted up on the cross. The antiphon that opens the Mass is Simeon’s prophecy of the sword. The sermon read in the Office is St. Bernard’s, on the exchange made under the cross: “What an exchange! John is given to you in place of Jesus, the servant in place of the Lord, the disciple in place of the master; the son of Zebedee replaces the Son of God, a mere man replaces God himself.”

The Gospel read at the Mass is St. John’s account of this hour. Before it the Church sings: “Blessed are you, O Blessed Virgin Mary; without dying you won the martyr’s crown beside the cross of the Lord.”