While the words written in red throughout the four Gospels should be esteemed with the highest reverence, the words Jesus spoke from Calvary’s cross are especially potent. The Apostle John wrote:
When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing by, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then He said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour that disciple took her to his own home (John 19:26-27 NKJV).
As we read through John’s account of Jesus’ suffering, we see Jesus has been beaten, His clothes ripped from His body, the crown of thorns and nails leaving streaks of precious blood running from the wounds foretold in the Old Testament. As the wordsmith he was, John painted a picture of our Savior’s suffering as He endured a heinous death by crucifixion while depicting His compassion as a loving son and friend. Let’s consider three important lessons we can learn as Jesus expressed His love for Mary and His trust in “the disciple whom He loved.”
Jesus and Mary
The first and most obvious lesson comes from Jesus’ concern for His mother. Mary had loved and nurtured Him from His holy conception to these final moments as He suffered to bring new life to her through His shed blood. As the firstborn Jewish son, His earthly responsibility was to ensure the well-being of His mother since we can assume Joseph had already passed, given his absence at the foot of the cross.
God’s Word shows the priority a man must give to the care and provision of his immediate family. Even as Jesus fulfilled His eternal destiny to provide salvation for lost people, He made sure to take care of His beloved mother in His final breaths.
His example shows us the importance of caring for our family business, even as we work to build the kingdom of God. In 1 Timothy 5:8, the Apostle Paul wrote, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (NIV). Ultimately, nothing we do to build the kingdom of God outside our homes should take precedence over how we love and provide for the needs inside our homes.
Jesus and John
The second poignant lesson is the relationship Jesus had with the Apostle John. As one of the first to follow Jesus and one of three who were almost constantly present for Jesus’ miracles throughout His ministry, Jesus had an intimate bond with John. He and his brother James were the only disciples recorded to have been nicknamed by Jesus. He called them the “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17), believed to be a result of their hot-tempered nature, evidenced in Luke 9 when they wanted to call down fire on the Samaritans who snubbed Jesus as He came through their village (vv. 51-56). For many of us, it’s important to know Jesus can still love and use us despite our leanings toward hot-headedness!
How amazing it must have been to be trusted by the Savior of the world to care for the woman most dear to Him! Shouldn’t we all strive daily to be the kind of people God can trust with big responsibility? We can take comfort in knowing Jesus wasn’t looking for perfection. Jesus’ omnipotence notwithstanding, the closeness of John as they walked through daily life and ministry undoubtedly revealed all of his flaws and misgivings. Yet, Jesus saw in him the best representative of love and care Mary could receive besides His own. Talk about life goals!
Jesus and His Adopted Children
A third lesson to draw from this scene is a bit less obvious. Paul repeatedly referred to adoption in three of his letters, saying Christ’s followers have “received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father’” (Romans 8:15 NKJV). However, most of us have probably not thought of John 19:26-27 through the lens of adoptive love based on the fact that Mary was likely an older widow at the time. Jesus was certainly completing His final duty to His mother within the custom of the Jewish people, but looking at this situation so simply will cause us to miss one of the most poignant gifts of Christ’s suffering and bloodshed.
The Jewish people of Christ’s day, and even to a large extent in our present time, put an exceptional value on bloodlines, birthright, and their given hierarchy. We have countless examples throughout the Old Testament of how important genealogy was (and is) in Jewish culture with entire sections dedicated to recording the who’s who of family lineage. But in these final moments, Jesus reset the spiritual genetics of all humanity, past and present. The meanings of family, connection, inheritance, and acceptance were all reorganized to illustrate that the family of God is inclusive of everyone who believes and follows Him, regardless of whoever they were or were not before.
Most of us who have been Christians for a while have heard about our adoption into the family of God taught from numerous platforms. Still, it’s important to note this truth of becoming family—loving, supporting, and carrying each other through the hardships life brings—was imperative enough to the message of the Cross for Jesus to speak about it in a dying whisper for all of us to hear more than 2,000 years later.
Our realization of this should not only bring about a fuller knowledge of God’s love for each of us but implore us to be the family of God genuinely—people Jesus can trust to love and care for the broken, helpless, and in need of the kind of love that only His family can provide.
Let’s be the family of God today and walk worthy of His blessed assignment and example. Of course, God’s family tree still has a few wayward branches, and the bark may be peeling off in places, but the fruit of kindness, love, longsuffering, and gentleness still apply to the more difficult grafting. There is evidence galore in Scripture of Jesus loving and nurturing a meddling mother and a couple of hot-headed brothers despite their humanity, so we can learn to love anyway, too!
Nicki S. Kinley, LCSW, is president of Restoration Counseling Center in Bryant, Arkansas. restorationcounseling.com