EASTER OCTAVE, DAY THREE: “Woman, Behold Your Son!”
by Stephen Noll, Contending Anglican:
“Woman, behold, your son!” … “Behold, your mother!”
John 19:25-27
I preached this meditation on Good Friday 1999 in my parish church in Sewickley, PA, shortly before my wife and I made a momentous trip to Africa. For a more recent meditation on this word, see my post “I’m Trading My Shame.”
“Woman, behold, your son!” … “Behold, your mother!” The third word from the Cross is surely the most mundane of the seven. Jesus cried out to his Father; Jesus spoke words of eternal comfort to the penitent thief. But here, it seems, he simply completes a piece of family business. One might even wonder why, knowing that he was going to die, he had not made the arrangements for his mother earlier.
But is this really all this word is about? The church fathers had a way of reading Scripture that allowed for several levels of meaning in a text, in some cases finding four separate senses. We might call these levels the plain sense, the moral sense, the spiritual sense, and the final sense. Let’s look briefly at Jesus’ words to his mother and the beloved disciple John from each of these perspectives.
The Plain Sense
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