‘Christ’s Seven Last Words’ is a production of the University Church in Oxford, featuring Professor Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, which will be released each evening throughout Holy Week.
In this third episode, Professor Graham Ward reflects on the words, ‘Woman, behold your Son’.
Music sung by the University Church Choir.
Sound design by Ana-Maria Nicu
With Christ’s words of a welcome into paradise to the penitent thief, something new begins at the very apex of Christ’s suffering: a new gathering. Following the Last supper there is a great fragmentation. The embryonic church receiving the first eucharistic sacrament is scattered, not sent out into the world. But now Christ gathers at the cross, his body upon that cross, a new community. “You will be with me” opens a new inclusion within himself, and new incorporation and shared identity. This is now extended in this third of Christ’s words: “Woman, behold your son…behold your mother.”
This is a rich few words, dense with mystery for an understanding of church. I can only touch upon what is manifestly manifold here. For, at its heart, it is the birth of the church that is spoken of. In her bereavement and loss, Mary, who gave birth to God with us, is given a new son by her son, and John, as disciple, is grafted into the genealogy of the divine. But there is something further. The disciple interchanges with the Christ. He takes upon himself, though not upon his own authority but through the Word of Christ, an adoptive sonship. He becomes an imitatio Christi, a modelling of Christ in the world, a new birth not of the will of the flesh, but through the love of God. He becomes protector, nurturer. Here is something profound, and by profound I mean something that is to be contemplated over and over that we might understand ourselves as hidden with Christ in God. This profundity is signalled by the repetition ‘behold’. For with ‘behold’ comes the command, the demand, to gaze into and reflect upon both the mystery of the incarnation and the mystery of redemption – simultaneously. To the mother of God is revealed the meaning of the incarnation, understood prophetically in the Magnificat: that the Messiah came to redeem through the birthing of a new community. To the beloved disciple is revealed the meaning of redemption: to live as Christ in the world, incorporated into God through His Son, Jesus Christ. And at the very centre of that beholding stands the cross, the suffering of Christ by the world, for the world (all those people, powers, and institutional dominions that put him there). The work of salvation begins, not by taking either Mary or John out of the world, but placing them both within the very brokenness and violence of that world which the crucifixion brings to light. And the means by which this interchange, identification and newly birthed gathering takes place is love: of mother and son, of son and disciple, of son and mother. The identification is not just with the glorified and raised up Christ. The contemplation of ‘behold’ is not just an entering into the mystical and beatified body. The identification upon which we are commanded to contemplate is also with the suffering and humiliation of Christ crucified. “From that hour the disciple took the mother into all that was his own” and Christ is left alone.
