Mary, the Mother of God - Paragon of Discipleship (Sept 8)

Readings, John 2:1-12 and John 19:25b-30
Image, Benny Andrews, Portrait of Black Madonna (1987)

These are first and last great signs of Jesus’ glory in the Gospel of John, and his mother Mary is interwoven in both. Indeed, we might say not only interwoven, but – as is the case with the first – integral to its beginning, and – in the case of the latter – foundational to what will follow. But let’s go back further to find a starting point.
 
Mary is Jesus’ first teacher. Like many a parent, she teaches the child those basic things of life, the elemental building blocks of being a person. And like parents who live religious lives, she would have also taught Jesus things basic to the life of faith, wrapping the rhythms of their daily life around God’s stories, festivals, and rituals. She would have imparted and impressed those basic building blocks of being part of the people of God.
 
And yet, she was also a parent with a specific commission. She was called by God to bear the saviour of her people, to carry Emmanuel in her body and lead him into life. And she was entrusted to instruct Jesus in this commission, teach him what she had been taught, make his what she proclaimed in song while he grew in her womb. It is she who would have imparted those words of the shepherds she treasured in her heart, those words of Simeon that brought blessing and dread, those words of Gabriel which reoriented her life.
 
Who better than she, then, to prompt Jesus to act – to bring about the hour at which his ministry began, the hour at which his glory shall begin to be revealed. Who better than she, to issue the imperative by which followers of Jesus shall live: Do whatever he tells you.
 
Mary is thus not only a paradigmatic disciple – one who receives with vigour the command of God and allows it to reshape the direction of her life. But she exemplifies the task of Christian teaching and instruction; especially of the young. She takes up eagerly the task laid before her to instruct her child in the wisdom of God, and the task and commission laid before him. And she takes this on with such enthusiasm and authority that she can take the prerogative to come before the world’s redeemer and say, it is time to begin.
 
From this beginning, until the bitter end, she remains by Jesus’ side. We read in that upon the cross he looks down and uses a few of his remaining words to say to his mother, Woman, here is your son, and to the disciple he loved, here is your mother. And while we can be moved by this as an act of filial devotion, to remain there lessens the lesson on offer.
 
Jesus, in both these stories refers to his mother as woman, signalling not the unimportance of her relation to him and specific role in God’s plan, but pointing through to the most important role one can play: that of a disciple. Who are my mother and brothers, Jesus famously asks of the crowds, Those who hear the word of God and do it… and while this is sometimes read as a rebuke to those who would pay particular attention to Mary, we are better led to recognise that who among the gospels characters more perfectly performs the word of God than Mary the mother of Jesus?
 
Such a lesson is repeated elsewhere, where a woman shouts to Jesus, Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you, to which Jesus responds, Blessed rather are those who hear the word and obey it. Again, the lesson is not to find here a dismissal of Mary in the shaping of our faith, but to direct the eye at where that significance is found.* It is not, as if, Mary’s womb is blessed in abstraction, that the breasts which nursed Jesus are holy simply for that act. No, Mary is to be celebrated and emulated, chiefly because of those traits which we might replicate. It is not her womb that we aspire, but the example she sets as one who heard the word and obeyed. Who said to the angel, I am a servant of the Lord, and took the risk of bearing the world’s scorn, in order to bear God. Blessed is she who heard the word and obeyed, who taught the saviour of the world, and accompanied him as sign by sign he revealed his glory.
 
Which leads us back to the foot of the cross, and those last words of Jesus. Here Mary, while remaining Jesus’ first family is also first in his new family, created by the Word to be his body, the church, a further sign of his glory. She receives a Spirit of adoption from the one she birthed. A mother given to a friend, the beloved to a mother and in this they become family to each other – not by blood but by the Word, bound only by commission and obedience. It is in this same way that we are given to one another as family in baptism – siblings of Christ, and kin to one another.
 
Mary, unlike so many of the disciples, does not depart from Jesus, even when there is so much risk and grief. It is this discipleship which is recognised, the same discipleship she displayed when the angel came, practiced when she taught Jesus, and exercised when she told him to make new wine. It is this discipleship that makes her favoured, blessed, and worthy of calling into the new family of Christ. For it is this kind of discipleship by which the church shall extend into all the world preaching the spirit of adoption.
 
Her discipleship, which we call blessed, is at least part (if not the significant part) of what we take from the life and witness of the first Mary in this series. And if we are to attempt to emulate her example, we must draw on the same strength on which she drew. She, like we, become disciples in the knowledge of God’s presence and promise to look on us as favoured, lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things. The strength to stay by Christ’s side through the glory and the bloodshed is built on the trust in the great things God has done. The humility and grace to become a family established at the foot of a cross is fed by finding in the simple things a holiness most profound. In Christ we have received a spirit of adoption, made children of God, and when we consider what it means to live in light of this great joy and responsibility, we take as an example Jesus’ mother; who heard the word of God, bore him in her womb, led him by the hand, and followed him all the days of her life.

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*My thanks to Dr Ali Robinson for this insight.