“Woman, here is your son.” : A reflection on motherhood and the cross.
Michelangelo’s Pietà
Holy Week Reflection - 2023
“When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.””
The scene on Golgotha, especially for Catholics, holds a special pride of place in the discourses surrounding the holy sacraments of the Church, and most particularly of the Eucharist and Holy Orders. We see this in the Mass of the Holy Chrism that occurs just days before Holy Week where diocesan priests renew their sacred promises, and on Holy Thursday at the celebration of the Institution of the Eucharist. On Good Friday, the priests lay prostrate at the foot of the altar signifying the oneness of the priestly act that Jesus gifts his Church from Calvary and through the ages.
It is unsurprising and not of little significance that these crucial moments which established the rites of the Church and the means by which Jesus continues to gift us His presence in the same ways he gifted this to his first disciples. After all, the death of Christ and His Resurrection are essential and foundational moments in the Christian faith. After all, without the death of Christ and without His resurrection, this story may not have survived the ages.
With all of the ritual richness of tradition that Holy Mother Church offers us these days, a special emphasis is placed on the vocation of the ministerial priesthood. While this state of life is essential to the mission of the Church, it is not to be confused as the pinnacle of vocation as often tends to be the case. In fact, I offer this reflection as it may be timely for us as Catholics to momentarily take our gaze away from the clerical life of the Church and to reflect on another vocation that is upheld in the story of Calvary: motherhood.
Womanhood is traditionally venerated as a life giving force, a stronghold of wisdom for families, societies, and cultural institutions ranging from education to healthcare. Of course, this is attributable to that unique function of womanhood; childbearing, and the responsibilities that follow. The woman is widely positioned in society as a nurturer, as comfort, as wisdom, and in many ways, as grieving.
Cultures around the world not only praise womanhood, but fear it – wonder and awe are both present here as well as in relation to the divine – concocting both legends and myths of womanly spirits who bear mystical powers, and who curse and are cursed by grief. For example, there exist stories of wailing women who died in childbirth or maimed their children and who haunt the living in search of retribution or forgiveness for their sins, recognizable by the wretchedness of their cries; La Llorona in hispanic and latino cultures, the Banshee in Irish folklore, the Churile in Guyana, and the list can continue. In so many ways, life, death, comfort, and grief are embodied by the woman in our anthropologies, and even contemporary psychoanalysts and scholars (like Elissa Marder, who I had the privilege of learning from in a visiting lecture in graduate school) find a vital link between the maternal womb and the crypt. (see: The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction, 2012)
All of this in mind, along with the current state of discourse surrounding womanhood and motherhood in our contemporary American and broader Western culture, it is important that we take time to reflect on the vocation that Christ himself edifies and confirms from the cross.
St. Paul writes in Philippians 2:8-10, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” While it is true that the perfection of Christ’s priestly obedience is found in his own laying down of his life on the cross, it is also worth noting that this same Christ, who came not to do away with the law, but fulfill it (Matthew 5:17), in this new covenant confirms the law in honoring his mother as the law prescribes.
As the philosopher Baruch Spinoza holds in Chapter III of his Theological-Political Treatise, at the very least, the covenantal laws handed to the Israelites through Moses can be understood as economic arrangements for a people who by their own flaws seemed to be unable to order their own social and political lives (TTP III, 14-17). The religious interpretation, of course, points out that these economic arrangements then are good in a moral way. While Spinoza himself would by and large disagree with this statement (“good” and “bad” being inadequate ideas for the philosopher), he would agree that the merit of these moral arrangements would be found in their necessity.
Of course, the Christian perspective would have it that those things which God himself deems necessary are things which are good, and so, the command to honor one’s mother and father is for us both good and necessary. To honor one’s father and mother, in this view, has less directly to do with respect for authority as many of us have been catechized (and I think quite erroneously), as it has to do with the return of gratitude for providence: our parents provide us with life among other necessities as food, warmth, housing, and so it is fitting that our societal mores are structured in such a way that our parents are in turn cared for in their older age with or without us.
If, as it is, even in the long moments before death, while hanging torn and bloodied on the cross, Jesus takes a moment before his dying breaths to give his mother to his beloved friend to ensure that she will have housing, food, and all the necessities for the sustenance of life, then it might be important to recognize just how important the work of the mother is in the soteriological work of the Church.
It is arguably a fact that at least in the New Testament, the first “call” or vocation of which we are told is the call of Mary to bear the person of Jesus in her own womb; to mother God. The call and response of Mary is one of profound obedience; and this obedience is both the beginning of and the root of the tradition of Christian life. Without so much of a moment’s hesitation, as it is announced to her that she is to be the mother of the child Jesus, she accepts this fate with a courageous faith in God’s will for her life. Her “fiat” begins this chapter of the greatest love story ever told.
The same faithful obedience that St. Paul describes in his letter to the Philippians in reference to the death of Jesus is presumably the same faithful obedience that Jesus learned from witnessing the faithfulness of His mother. In fact, I cannot help but imagine that the Jesus we know from the Gospels was formed in His perfect humanity by the perfect faithfulness of His mother, Mary. In my mind, this motherhood was both the necessary and good foundation for our salvation, and prefigures and sets up the beautiful character of Jesus whose humanity and personhood catalyzed and enabled the divine work of salvation.
It is often split in our imagination that Jesus was both human and divine in an unconfused manner, and that His humanity would be nurtured, just as ours, by His parents.
For this reason, the Church boldly proclaims that the family is first and foremost the sociological foundation of our Church; and it is the work of religion in the home or the domestic church by our parents which fosters a faithfulness that participates in the priestly work of Christ in calling all men to himself. It is through the love, patience, gentleness, wisdom, gratitude, and temperance nurtured and practiced in the home that will in turn return the hearts of men to God by the joy lived in these Christian virtues.
The call to parenthood is a holy and sacred vocation and in fact has always, from the beginning of time, been the means by which God had intended for his faithfulness to be transmitted from generation to generation. For this reason we must be mindful that the Church considers marriage and parenthood to be the ordinary call to holiness that most individuals are called to, and that the call to ministerial priesthood or religious life is an extraordinary call.
Yet while it is true that parenthood – both fatherhood and motherhood – are equally holy vocations in the life of the Church, the vocation of motherhood is qualitatively different. I cannot subjectively speak to this experience, but having known many women and mothers who have generously shared their own stories with me, I can attest that there is a sort of pain that mothers uniquely experience in their vocations as nurturers and caretakers. Those mothers, especially, who have lost children themselves know this visceral pain all too well. I will not attempt to qualify it here.
To return to a point made earlier, Elissa Marder, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University, as well as a scholar of psychoanalysis, points out that there is an intimate relationship between birth and death, and that psychoanalytically a map can be drawn that clearly demonstrates that the libidinal drives that keep us going in life are also directed back to the unitary memory of the comfort of the womb by means of remembering the pangs of birth. This is to say in somewhat unsophisticated terms that death is conversely analogous to birth; whereas birth brings us from the womb to separation by means of the traumatic event of birth, death returns us from lively separation to that same comfort of unity signified by the womb via the pangs of death.
Motherhood, then, holds an originary and sacred space in the ways we understand life and its orientation towards death as its earthly finality. Mothers understand in a precognitive and pre-propositional manner this embodied truth and this closeness to suffering.
Hanging from the cross, Jesus offers his suffering mother a great condolence in calling her, “woman” – to detach her pain from his by separating her motherhood from his death – and offering her the protection of his beloved friend and brother, the apostle John.
I offer us this brief and rudimentary philosophical reflection on motherhood at the foot of the cross this week to perhaps take a moment to thank God for the mothers – both spiritual and natural – in our lives, and to offer and commit the sacrifices that each mother makes in her life as close to and cooperative with the saving work that Jesus does in our world. May we all continue to be grateful for our mothers and for the vocation of motherhood at large, and to be mindful of the sacred role they play in the salvation of souls and the mission of the Church in calling all to Father.