Mary, Mother of the Church (Monday after Pentecost Sunday)

Readings: Genesis 3:9-15, 20 OR Acts 1:12-14; Psalm 87; John 19:25-34

There are few enough homilies that are really memorable. For each person I suppose there are a few that stay in the memory, perhaps more because of a personal significance they have for each person than for anything else about them. Sometimes, though, it is the originality of a homily that causes it to stick.

One such homily for me was given by Herbert McCabe OP, preaching on today's gospel reading, chosen for this new memory of Mary, Mother of the Church. We normally work with this text in its final form, as it is in our Bibles, in which Jesus sees his mother and the disciple he loved, and says something to each of them, things that seem like a neat pair of sayings going perfectly together - woman (Mary) behold your son (the beloved disciple), behold (beloved disciple) your mother (Mary). But Herbert proposed that the original form of this word from the cross was simply between Jesus and Mary: seeing his mother he said 'woman, behold your son'.

His comments about it are in a homily entitled 'The Wedding Feast at Cana' (God, Christ and Us, 2003, pp.79-82). He develops his thought about it from the fact that the words of Jesus to Mary and to the beloved disciples in John 19 has many echoes of the wedding feast of Cana in John 2. There are many links between the two texts, most notably Jesus addressing his mother as 'woman' and speaking of his 'hour'. In saying 'behold your son', referring to himself, he is showing her what she was really asking when, at Cana, she asked him to anticipate this hour.

It remains a very apt reading for today's memory, whether we go with the normal interpretation or the more eccentric McCabe one. Mary is Mother of the Church as mother of Jesus, for the Church is the Body of Christ. Mary is Mother of the Church in her care for and her being cared for by the disciple Jesus loved, for the disciples of Jesus, baptised into him, are members of that body which he had from her and so they are entitled to Mary's maternal care.

'Behold your son' Jesus says to Mary, showing her and all of us the kind of Messiah he was destined to be. Here is the hour in which the Father is glorified by him. Mary has a particular place in that story, in relation to Jesus and in relation to all who belong to Jesus. Mary is with the members of Christ's body in prayer and in charity but she is also with them in suffering as each one is asked to take up his or her cross and to follow the way of her Son. She has first place among the disciples in this also.

And it is what the McCabe interpretation seeks to underline. Mary is Mother of the Church, yes, but only because she is in the first place Mother of Jesus, mother of the Messiah, sharing his hour with particular force so that she could be maternal in her care for the beloved disciple, for all the apostles and disciples of the Lord, for all men and women who have been, or are, or will be, members of his Body.

It is because of her relationship with Jesus that Mary is Mother of the Church and, each day, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.