Stand By The Cross

Most of us would rather do something for the people we love than simply stay with them while they suffer. Doing feels useful. Staying feels like failure. So we fill the hospital room with errands and the funeral week with logistics, and we call it love. Today the Church puts before us a woman who did nothing at all on Calvary. She stood. That is the whole of what John records about her: “standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother” (John 19:25). And in that standing the Church has always seen the highest thing a creature ever did with her suffering.

Today is the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, and the two readings fit together more tightly than they first appear. Paul tells the Corinthians that God has arranged every member of Christ’s body as he intended, that the parts which look weakest are the most necessary, and that we should earnestly desire the higher gifts (1 Corinthians 12:18, 22, 31). Then John shows us the moment the body of Christ was actually assembled: a dying Son, a Mother, and one disciple who didn’t run. Mary held no office on Paul’s list. She was no apostle, no prophet, no teacher, no healer. And she is the greatest member of the body after her Son, because she had the one gift Paul was about to call the more excellent way.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 27-31a

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But earnestly desire the higher gifts.

Gospel: John 19:25-27

So the soldiers did this. But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

Scriptural Analysis

Paul opens with a comparison his readers had heard a hundred times. The body as a picture of society was the most common image for civic unity in the ancient world. Livy records the Roman senator Menenius Agrippa talking a rebellious mob out of sedition with a fable about the hands and mouth revolting against the belly and starving the whole body in the process. When Roman orators reached for this image, they meant to keep the lower orders in their place. The belly, after all, was the ruling class.^[1]

Paul does two things with the picture that no pagan orator did. He attributes the arrangement of the members to God’s will rather than to nature (1 Corinthians 12:18, 24), and he flips the argument. Where Menenius used the body to demand the subordination of the weak to the strong, Paul uses it to insist on the interdependence of every member, then goes further: the members that seem weaker are all the more necessary, and it is on the less honorable parts that God has bestowed greater honor (1 Corinthians 12:22-24).^[2]

Notice what Paul actually says in verse 12: “so it is with Christ,” where we expect “so it is with the Church.” George Montague points out that this is shorthand rooted in Paul’s own conversion, when the risen Lord asked him on the Damascus road, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). Paul had never laid a hand on Jesus. He had laid hands on Christians. Since the resurrection, God’s plan is that Christ be many: the whole Christ, head and members. Paul thinks of our union with Christ in realistic, almost physical terms, the same way he did when he warned the Corinthians that joining themselves to a prostitute meant joining Christ’s members to her (1 Corinthians 6:15).^[3]

That is why verse 13 speaks of baptism. Some Protestant commentators want to read “baptism” here as a metaphor for a shared inner experience of the Spirit, but Paul’s normal usage and the baptismal formula echoing Galatians 3:28 point to the sacrament itself, the act by which a person is incorporated into the body. And “made to drink” reaches back to the rock in the wilderness, the rock Paul has already identified as Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4), and forward to the eucharistic cup (1 Corinthians 11:25). Baptism joins us to the risen body of Christ; the Eucharist keeps us joined. The unity Paul describes is sacramental before it is social. It is why Jew and Greek, slave and free, found themselves brothers and sisters around the same table.^[4]

The lectionary skips the middle of the chapter, where the foot complains that it is not a hand, and lands on verse 27: “you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Then comes the only numbered list of charisms anywhere in the New Testament. First apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then everything else. The first three are named as persons, roles that had become recognized ministries in the Church; the rest are named as gifts. And tongues comes last. The Corinthians would never have put it last. That is the point. The gift they prized most, the flashiest one, the one that had become a source of cliques and one-upmanship in the assembly, gets put at the bottom of the list, with its correlative gift of interpretation right beside it.^[5]

The seven rhetorical questions that follow all expect the answer no. Nobody has every gift, and God’s diversity is the reason, so envying another member’s gift is a complaint against God’s arrangement. Then verse 31: “earnestly desire the higher gifts.” The Greek verb, zēloute (zay-LOO-teh), could be read as a statement, but the parallel with 14:1 settles it as a command. Paul means it. But what does striving mean, if the charisms are gifts? Montague answers: praying for the gift, being docile enough to receive it, and then exercising it, since charismatic grace is given in seed with the Holy Spirit already in baptism. Tertullian sent the newly baptized straight from the font to ask the Father for the gifts.^[6]

And then the lectionary stops, mid-verse, at 31a. The second half of the verse is “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and the way is chapter 13, the hymn to love. Montague’s summary is the sharpest I know: “The charisms are the slaves, love is the master.”^[7] Hold that thought, because the Gospel is about a woman who had no charism on the list and all of the love.

John tells the crucifixion in five short scenes, and the Mother of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple stand at the center. The Synoptics report a group of women watching from a distance (Matthew 27:55; Mark 15:40). Only John puts them by the cross, and only John mentions the mother of Jesus at all. Aquinas takes up the apparent contradiction and answers it plainly: near and far are relative, and the women may well have stood close enough to speak with him at the start, then withdrawn as the mockers pressed in.^[8] What matters more is who was there and who wasn’t. The disciples fled. The women stayed. Aquinas reads Job’s line “my bone cleaves to my skin” (Job 19:20) as a figure of it: the flesh, the disciples, fell away, and the skin, the women, clung to Christ.^[9]

Jesus sees his mother and the disciple, and speaks. Martin and Wright observe that this is the same “see and say” revelatory pattern John uses from the first chapter onward, where one person sees another and declares that person’s role in God’s plan. From the cross, Jesus reveals the relationships that constitute the Church. He calls his mother “Woman,” as he did at Cana (John 2:4), and in John she appears only in those two places. At Cana she stood for the faithful people of God; at the cross she becomes the mother of the Church. Behind the title stand two figures from the Old Testament: Mother Zion, who in Isaiah gathers her scattered children home (Isaiah 60:4; 66:7-13), and Eve, the “woman” who became “the mother of all the living” (Genesis 2:23; 3:20). A new Eve is being named at the tree, and her children are those being re-created by the Spirit.^[10]

“Behold, your son.” In the first sense, the son is Jesus himself, addressing his own mother from the cross. But the words to the disciple settle the deeper sense: “Behold, your mother.” Both are now Mary’s sons. The Beloved Disciple shares in Jesus’ life as the Son and, by implication, has Jesus’ mother as his own. Origen and Augustine both read it this way, and the Catechism follows them: Mary’s motherhood of the Church is grounded in her motherhood of Christ, whose life the disciples share.^[11] Aquinas adds something I find moving. At Cana Jesus had told her, “My hour has not yet come.” Aquinas hears that as a promise: I cannot work miracles through what I have from you, only through what I have from the Father, but when the hour of my passion comes, the hour I suffer in the flesh I received from you, then I will acknowledge you. And now the hour has come, and he does.^[12]

The last clause is the one people skip. “From that hour the disciple took her to his own home.” Moloney notices that the Greek phrase ap’ ekeinēs tēs hōras (ahp eh-KAY-nace tace HO-rahs) can mean “from that time” but can also carry a causal sense, “because of that hour.” Because of the cross, a new family exists. And the phrase “to his own,” eis ta idia (ace tah ID-ee-ah), is the same phrase the Prologue used when the Word came “to his own home, and his own people received him not” (John 1:11). At the cross, that refusal is reversed. The disciple receives what the world did not.^[13] Martin and Wright add that the verb “took” is the ordinary Johannine word for receiving heavenly realities, and Aquinas, following Augustine against Bede, insists it cannot mean property, since John had left everything to follow Christ (Matthew 19:27). He took her into his own care, his own guardianship, to serve her the way a son serves a mother.^[14]

Then, three verses later, Jesus bows his head and hands over the Spirit (John 19:30). Moloney reads the verb literally: he does not simply expire; he entrusts the Spirit to the family he has just gathered at the foot of the cross.^[15] Put the two readings side by side. Paul says we are one body because we were baptized in one Spirit and made to drink of one Spirit. John shows the moment the body was formed and the Spirit given: a Mother, a disciple, a cross. The Church began here, seven weeks before Pentecost.

Daily Application

There is a plain lesson here that Aquinas draws out before he gets to anything mystical. He notes how Augustine says that Christ on the cross is like a teacher in his chair, and one of the things he teaches from that chair is that we honor our parents and provide for them in their need (Exodus 20:12; 1 Timothy 5:8). Jesus, dying, arranged for his mother’s care. If he could do that with nails in his hands, we can pick up the phone.^[16] Somebody reading this has a parent, or a widowed aunt, or an old friend who has been left without a protector. Go be the one who takes them in.

But the deeper demand of this feast is about what we do with suffering we cannot fix. Paul says that if one member suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26), and Martin and Wright note that the Church chose this Gospel for today’s memorial precisely because watching a loved one suffer, and being powerless to change it, is one of the hardest things a human being ever does. Mary could change nothing on Calvary. What she could do was stay, and unite herself to it.^[17] The Catechism, quoting the Council, says she stood there in keeping with God’s plan, bearing with her only Son the intensity of his suffering, joining herself with his sacrifice in her mother’s heart.^[18] Saint Ambrose puts it even more sharply: she stood fearlessly while the others fled, looked on her Son’s wounds with pity, and saw in them the salvation of the world.^[19]

That is the gift Paul’s list doesn’t name, and every Christian is called to. Mary was not an apostle, a prophet, or a teacher. Her charism was to stand at the cross and love. And Aquinas, commenting on the seamless tunic just a few verses earlier, says the tunic woven from the top signifies charity, which is above all the other virtues and comes to us from the Holy Spirit rather than from ourselves, and he proves it by quoting today’s very verse: “I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31).^[20] When you feel like the foot that is not a hand, when your gifts seem small next to the people who preach and heal and organize, remember that the greatest member of the body after Christ himself had no listed gift at all. She had the one that outranks them.

The Church gives us an optional Sequence at today’s Mass, the Stabat Mater, traditionally attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi in the 13th century. It opens with the scene itself, “Stabat Mater dolorosa, iuxta crucem lacrimosa,” the sorrowful Mother standing in tears beside the cross while her Son hung there. And then it turns into a prayer that is almost reckless: make me weep with you, make me carry Christ’s death, make me share his wounds. The hymn asks to be let in.^[21] Pray it today, or read it slowly. Then take whatever suffering is in your house right now, the diagnosis you can’t cure, the child who has walked away, the marriage you can’t repair by yourself, and instead of managing it, stand in it. Stand the way she stood, with Jesus, beside the person who is suffering, and offer it with him.

You will not feel useful. You will feel exactly as useless as Mary felt on Golgotha. And you will be doing the most necessary work in the body of Christ. Behold your mother. Then go stand where she stood.

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Notes

1. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 458-59. ↩
2. Collins, First Corinthians, 460; George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 215. ↩
3. Montague, First Corinthians, 213. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 213; Collins, First Corinthians, 462-63. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 217-18; Collins, First Corinthians, 467-68. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 214, 218-19; Collins, First Corinthians, 471. ↩
7. Montague, First Corinthians, 220. ↩
8. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 9-21, trans. Fabian R. Larcher (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), no. 2436. ↩
9. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, no. 2438. ↩
10. Francis Martin and William M. Wright IV, The Gospel of John, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 320-21. ↩
11. Martin and Wright, Gospel of John, 321; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 501. ↩
12. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, no. 2440. ↩
13. Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 503-4. ↩
14. Martin and Wright, Gospel of John, 321; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, no. 2443. ↩
15. Moloney, Gospel of John, 504-5. ↩
16. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, no. 2441. ↩
17. Martin and Wright, Gospel of John, 322. ↩
18. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 964. ↩
19. Franciscan Media, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” Saint of the Day, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/our-lady-of-sorrows/. ↩
20. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, no. 2429. ↩
21. Stabat Mater, Sequence for the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, September 15, in the Lectionary for Mass (USCCB). ↩

Books Cited

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• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John 9-21, Latin-English Opera Omnia vol. 36, trans. Fabian R. Larcher, OP (The Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic)
• Francis Martin and William M. Wright IV, The Gospel of John, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2015)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Francis J. Moloney, SDB, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Liturgical Press, 1998)