This is the third essay in a series coming out every Wednesday in Lent, under the general title “The Last Words of Jesus.”  Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations in this essay are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Please feel free to share it, to like it or comment or ask a question, or tell your friends that you’ve found it helpful.  And be sure to hit the [subscribe] button, to make sure you don’t miss any of them.  


When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.”  Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home (John 19:26-27).

“The disciple whom Jesus loved.”  It always catches me a little off guard, whenever I read that description.  I have always been well convinced that Jesus loved all his disciples; he loved those who followed him faithfully from town to town, and he loved those who stayed home in the town where they lived and provided hospitality when Jesus came to that town.  He loved those who had not yet found the courage to believe in him.  He was the friend of sinners.  And he was the friend of scribes and Pharisees, though they did not believe it; he was their friend, even though they counted him as an enemy to be destroyed.  He loved the world, and he still does; he called to the world, and he still does; he reached out his hand in love to all the lost and confused, all the bitter and hopeful, all the depressed and all the oppressed and all the distressed.  And he still does.

And yet every once in a while the text mentions this one man, “the disciple that Jesus loved.”  New Testament scholars, along with many ordinary Bible readers, have noticed this, and commonly use the term “the beloved disciple” to refer to this man.  His name is never given.  And indeed, the term “the beloved disciple” is never used in the text of scripture.  That’s our term, rather than the Bible’s.  Still, it is not a false or inaccurate term.  

This “disciple that Jesus loved” – who was he?  We cannot know for sure, but there are a few clues.  One clue is this.  It is only the Gospel of John that mentions “the disciple that Jesus loved.”  This identifier is used six times in that gospel, but in no other text in the New Testament.

Another clue is this.  Among the disciples that Matthew, Mark, and Luke mention by name, we read about the two sons of Zebedee, James and John.  They are mentioned quite often.  They were not the most prominent among the twelve (that role, unquestionably, falls to Simon Peter); yet throughout the first three gospels James and John are quite noteworthy as well.  In contrast to this, in the gospel of John, although we see Peter mentioned just as often as in the other three gospels, and although we see mentions of Philip and Andrew and Thomas and several others, there is never any mention of either James or John by name.  We would almost think that the author of this fourth gospel was unaware that these two men had become members of the team.  

Only in its final chapter does the book mention that “the sons of Zebedee” were present in the boat when seven of the disciples went fishing, after the resurrection.  These “sons of Zebedee” are mentioned with no explanation.  When something like that happens, it is usually because the author was confident that the readers would know who these people were.  In contrast, at the first mention of many other people, the author of John provides us with some small detail to give us an additional way of identifying them.  With Simon Peter and Andrew, for example, we get the notice that they are brothers.  When Philip is introduced, we find out that he is from Bethsaida.  Nicodemus gets identified as a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews; Judas is identified as the son of Simon Iscariot; Lazarus, Mary and Martha are identified as siblings;  Thomas is identified by his nickname “the Twin.”  In all these instances the author was providing small bits of information to enable the reader to gain a little more sense of who these various characters were, to better grasp the role they played in the narrative.  Yet when we come to the closing chapter of the gospel of John, suddenly there is this bare mention of “the sons of Zebedee”  – without naming them, and without offering any little detail about them.  Why is that?

As a general rule, it’s a foolish game to psychologize too much about what was going on in the mind of an author from 2000 years ago.  It may seem obvious to us what that person must have been thinking; but there is no way to guarantee that our version of ‘obvious’ would match with someone from long ago, when people spoke a different language and lived in a different culture than our own.  We might guess, but there is no sure way to measure the accuracy of our guess about the author’s mindset.  Even so, often all we can do is speculate that this author told us nothing about the sons of Zebedee – not even their names – because he was confident we already knew who they were.  When we do, we must remember that a speculation is not a fact.

Tentatively, then, we can look at how John lists these seven disciples:  Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples (John 21:2).  John tells us, a bit later, that the beloved disciple was one of these seven:   Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper (John 21:20).  The beloved disciple thus is clearly not Simon Peter.  There is no evidence to suggest that the disciple whom Jesus loved could be Thomas or Nathanael.  If the beloved disciple was one of the two unnamed other disciples, then we have no way of knowing which of them it might be.  That leaves us with the sons of Zebedee; we have already noted that they are not named here, but we know from the other three gospels that they were James and John.  

A third clue is the tradition within the early church that the author of the fourth gospel was John, son of Zebedee.  The historian Eusebius, who wrote during the fourth century, stated that the common consensus at that time was that John son of Zebedee, one of the original twelve, was the author of the gospel and the first letter of John, but that many thought that the additional letters, II John and III John, were written by another man.   This clear testimony from Eusebius is not the earliest report.  As early as the first decades of the second century we have a man named Polycarp, martyred for his faith in Jesus, who identified himself as a student of John the Apostle, the disciple whom Jesus loved.  

If you add these three clues together, they suggest that John son of Zebedee was both the author of the fourth gospel, and also the beloved disciple referred to six times in that gospel.  Depending on your personality, you might consider the three items as a chain or a rope.  If you look at them as a chain, then you will think that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  If any of these links appears frail or uncertain, you will be skeptical about whether the chain can hold:  you will expect that it will break.  If you look at them as a rope, then the three strands are woven together and lend support to one another:  as Ecclesiastes says, a cord of three strands is not easily broken (Ecclesiastes 4:2).

Let me say, straight up, that there is no definitive proof one way or the other.  In matters like these, we always wish there were some irrefutable testimony, some definitive evidence within the text, along with some clear historical records that we could cross-check:  and we do not have these with regard to the questions of “author of the gospel” or “identity of the beloved disciple.”

But I am willing to venture that these three strands fit together well, each lending a bit of strength to the other two, and so if we weave them together we end up with a cord that is fairly strong.  I won’t claim that it could never be broken; but I think on balance it is reasonable to accept that the fourth gospel was essentially authored by John son of Zebedee, one of the twelve original apostles.  I say “essentially authored” because it appears that he was the source of this material:  he spoke it, he reminisced it, he wrote about it, he taught it to the next generation.  It appears that it was his students, rather than John himself, who took the material they had received from him and assembled the material into its written form.  At least, that’s what they seem to indicate at the end of the book:  “the disciple whom Jesus loved … this is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:20, 24).  That is, the disciple whom Jesus loved gave us testimony, spoken and written, and we gathered these materials and published them:  and we testify in support of the truth of his testimony.  Who is this we who are offering this declaration?  They are the members of the community of the beloved disciple, to borrow the title of a book by the late Raymond Brown, one of the pre-eminent scholars of the Gospel of John.

So.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke report that when Jesus was arrested, all the apostles were overcome with fear and ran away.  Well, all but one, reports John.  Jesus looked down from the cross, and saw his mother there, looking up at him, watching him suffer.  And standing near her was the disciple that Jesus loved.  

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us that the apostles James and John were brothers, sons of a man named Zebedee; but these gospels do not tell us the name of Zebedee’s wife, the mother of James and John.  (She does get a cameo in Matthew 20:20-21, asking preferential treatment for her sons.)  Several sources in the second century give her name as Salome, and indicate that she was the Salome who was one of the women present at the crucifixion, and one of the women who had provided financial support to Jesus in his ministry; these sources also suggest she may have been the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  If that is correct, then James and John were the cousins of Jesus; which would mean they were not meeting him for the first time when he called them to become his disciples.  

If these second-century sources are correct, we can picture how Jesus looked down from the cross and saw his mother standing nearby, along with his cousin John, the disciple whom Jesus loved.  He said to his mother, “Here is your son,” and to his cousin, “Here is your mother.”  

I always feel a little puzzled when someone refers to himself or herself in the third person.  In 1962 Richard Nixon told the reporters at his press conference, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”  Donald Trump has frequently commented on his actions or person not by using pronouns – that is, by saying “People are out to get me” – but by using his name, as if he were talking about someone else:  “People are out to get Trump.”

Still, puzzling or not, this practice is ancient.  Julius Caesar wrote his autobiographical account of the war in Gaul, referring to himself as Caesar, and with the pronoun ‘he.’  Jesus himself often spoke this way; for example, asking his disciples “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” or saying “When the Son of Man comes in his glory.”  

Yet it keeps on striking me as odd when I think of John writing the Fourth Gospel, reporting to us the story of Jesus dying on the cross, and telling the story in the third person.  We would ordinarily expect him to say something like this:  “Jesus told his mother, ‘Here is your son,’ and nodded in my direction.  Then he looked at me as he said, ‘Here is your mother.’  And so I understood that he wanted me to take her into my home and make sure she had all she needed.  And that’s what I did.”  But that is not what the text reports.

Instead it says this:  “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”  As I have said, we do not have direct New Testament testimony that the author of the Gospel of John was John son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve:  there are, as I mentioned, three clues that would point us in that direction, yet not everyone finds those reasons persuasive.  On the other hand, we do have direct New Testament testimony that the Gospel of John comes from the disciple whom Jesus loved (as noted before, John 21:20, 24).  If we take that testimony seriously, then this saying of Jesus from the cross is embedded in a bit of autobiography on the beloved disciple’s part.  If Polycarp’s testimony is correct, if the other second-century accounts are correct, then John was right there, with his aunt Mary, watching his cousin Jesus being tortured to death on the cross.  He reports to us how Jesus assigned him the responsibility of caring from then on for Jesus’ mother, John’s aunt, as if she were John’s own mother.  This would appear to be an achingly heartfelt moment, intensely human, expressing a deep sense of family.  But John tells us the story as if this poignant conversation were happening to someone else.  Odd, isn’t it.

Let us come at this by considering the question of age.  Luke tells us that Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23), and John indicates in three different passages that Jesus went up from Galilee to Jerusalem for the Passover feast (John 2:23, 6:4, 11:55), which suggests that his ministry in Galilee and Judea ran for about three years, making him about 33 when he was arrested and crucified.  John is thought to have been the youngest of the apostles, younger than his brother James.  We might suppose that Salome was Mary’s younger sister, and that her firstborn son was James, and we might guess he was born five years after Jesus.  Perhaps there were some daughters, and then John was born, perhaps a dozen years after his brother James.  That would make him about thirteen when Jesus’ ministry began, and about sixteen when Jesus died.  At age thirteen he would be considered “of age” to make adult decisions, though he would still lack the maturity that he would grow into over time.  

I admit there are a lot of assumptions in that scenario, but work with me on this.  Given that situation, would it be plausible for us to envision that as John grew up he looked up to Jesus, the way younger siblings and cousins often look up with admiration to an older sister or brother, or favorite aunt or uncle?  Might Jesus have felt some special fondness for this young cousin?  We might suppose that most of the Twelve were around the same age as Jesus, or perhaps a few years younger; but John might well have been seventeen years younger, thirteen to Jesus’ thirty at the beginning of his public ministry.  So identifying himself as “the disciple that Jesus loved” may have been a simple recognition that John had been like a kid brother to Jesus for his whole life, with memories from his early childhood and from his preteen years of the way Jesus told him stories and made him laugh, memories of how Jesus sat with him in the synagogue and made him pay attention, memories of how Jesus brought him toys that he had carved for him, and taught him how to carve wood, too.  He would have been 3 when Jesus was 20; 8 when Jesus was 25.  Perhaps the thing John had known about Jesus for all of his thirteen years was that Jesus loved him.  And when Jesus had called him to be one of his disciples, his heart flared with the wonder of it:  and when he looked back on those three years of Jesus’ public ministry, and his own part in it, John thought of himself not as important, not as a leader – he was the youngest of the Twelve, hardly able to compete for leadership, when he was just thirteen, with men in their mid-twenties! – John thought of himself simply on the basis of this relationship with Jesus that he had known for as long as he had known anything at all:  Jesus loved him.  And when he looked back on this time – from thirty-five years later, or from sixty years later, depending on when you think the Gospel of John might have been put together – when John looked back on the time of Jesus’ ministry, the one thing that he knew above all else was that Jesus loved him.  Who was he?  He was just one of the disciples, the youngest of the disciples, hardly worth mentioning his name.  But he was someone that Jesus loved.

I do not believe that John viewed this in some sort of exclusive terms, as if it means that because Jesus loves me, he’s got nothing left to love you with:  I am the disciple that Jesus loves, and there are no others.  John did not mean that, when he spoke of himself as the disciple that Jesus loved.  Nor does he mean that Jesus loves me, and yeah, I guess he loves you too, but of course he loves me the best, and way more than he loves you.  No.  John testifies to the fact that God so loves the world (John 3:16), and that Jesus has come not to condemn the world but to save the world (John 3:17), and that Jesus is the Bread of Life who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (John 6:33-35), and that Jesus declared when he was lifted up in crucifixion he would draw all the world to himself (John 12:32-33), and that Jesus came not to judge the world but to save the world (John 12:47).  John’s sense of identity had become focused on this one thing:  Yes, Jesus loves me.  But there is no limit to the love of Jesus.  You can sing the same song along with me, because Yes, Jesus loves you, too.  

Part of the application from this is difficult.  If I am a follower of Jesus, I have to deal with the recognition that Jesus loves me, and he loves my enemies, too.  And that’s not the worst of it:  because he loves me, and also loves my enemies, he furthermore expects me to love my enemies just like he does.  We often have trouble with that.  But that’s what the biblical text tells us (Matthew 5:44).  

Most sermons on this passage, most scholarly treatises on this passage, focus on the identity of this beloved disciple, and on how Jesus spoke from the cross to him to give him this instruction to take care of his mother.  It is a worthy exploration.  I’ve done quite a bit of that myself, so far in this essay.  But I want to also to invest a little time noticing that there were actually three people in this picture, Jesus himself, this beloved disciple, and Mary the mother of Jesus.  The only one who speaks in this passage is Jesus.  The beloved disciple doesn’t say anything, but he takes action:  he brings Mary into his own home, and cares for her in the role of a son taking care of his widowed mother.  If he is John son of Zebedee, age 13 at the start of Jesus’ ministry, he is now a man of 16, and if Mary was a girl perhaps 14 years old when Jesus was born, she is now an old woman of 47.  

But Mary herself appears in this account as no more than a bystander, an elderly woman who needs others to take care of her.   She speaks no words, she takes no action, she is simply a widow who needs care, as Jesus hands off the responsibility to feed and house her from himself to his young cousin.  It’s odd.  If you were an elderly widowed grandmother, would you want people to assume that you couldn’t take care of yourself, so the best thing would be for your care and livelihood and welfare to be entrusted to a 16-year-old?  

So I get it, that when people explore this passage, they focus on Jesus, and they focus on the beloved disciple, and there is no focus on Mary.  She turns into a blurry face in the background.  To which I would say, “Hmm, not so fast.”  That’s all you’ll get of Mary, if you read just this passage and a bit of the Christmas story and assume you now know everything you need to know.  But that would be the wrong assumption to make.

We should notice that just as the mother of Jesus appears in this passage pretty close to the end of the gospel, so also she appears in a passage pretty close to the beginning of the gospel.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to me and to you? My hour has not yet come.”  His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”  Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.  Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim.  He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the person in charge of the banquet.” So they took it.  When the person in charge tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), that person called the bridegroom  and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”  Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him (John 2:1-11). 

This is, of course, the famous story of Jesus turning water into wine.  It mostly gets told as a miracle story, and there are a lot of details that we could notice about how the people respond to this miracle.  But let’s zoom in on the interaction between Jesus and his mother.  

The text reports that the mother of Jesus told him, “They have no more wine.”  It is a simple statement of fact, like a comment on the happy brightness of the sunshine or the brisk chill of the north wind.  But Jesus hears it as an instruction:  she has not simply informed him of a bit of information, but has implied that he should do something about it.

I can remember on several occasions when my mother instructed me, during my early teenage years, that the dishes in the sink needed washing, or that the dishes in the sink were not going to wash themselves.  On at least two such occasions, I ventured to agree with her:  “I think you’re right, Mom:  those dishes do need washing” or “perhaps they will invent some self-cleaning dishes that we could purchase.”  I have long recognized that being a smart aleck in that way is one of my chief spiritual gifts.  But the gift of smart-aleck-ness did not serve me well, in such moments.  My mother furthered my education by enabling me to see that when she had pointed these dirty dishes out to me, she was not simply providing information about a household situation:  she had given an implicit instruction that I was to take care of this situation.  (As to how she enabled me to see this:  alas, that information has somehow been lost in the recesses of time … )

When Mary told Jesus, “They have no more wine,” she intended for him to fix this problem.  And he knew it:  and resisted it.  You know what that’s like.  We were all teenagers once upon a time.  There was nothing like Mom telling us to do something to make us feel like we didn’t want to do it.  Somehow when we are no longer teenagers and think we have grown past that stage, Mom tells us to do something and we’re all thirteen once again.

It seems that there was a miracle on the schedule for that afternoon, with Jesus turning water into wine, but at the beginning of this story this miracle was not going to happen, because Jesus wasn’t paying attention to the lack of wine, until his mother got bossy and told him to take care of this situation; and even then he still wasn’t going to do it because he thought it wasn’t the right time for him to work a miracle.  Yet she persuaded him to do what he indicated he wasn’t going to do by getting the workers moving to do whatever Jesus told them to do.  It makes me wonder:  how many miracles have been on the agenda, throughout the centuries; how many miracles were scheduled within our own lives; but they never happened because nobody ever bothered to ask Jesus if he’d take care of them?

And more:  even when Mary had stepped forward to do that, what about the workers?  They were probably supposed to have the afternoon off because of the wedding, and now they had to load these big heavy jars onto the cart, bring it to the well, fill the jars with water, bring them back to the courtyard, and unload them from the cart.  (If the jars average 25 gallons in capacity, they are now far heavier:  25 gallons of water weighs about 200 pounds.)  This same miracle is still on the schedule, turning water into wine, but it’s still not going to happen unless someone brings the water.  Again it makes me wonder:  how many times have miracles been on the agenda, but they never happened because nobody did the hot and heavy labor of filling the water jars and bringing them to Jesus?

We could tell the story again, from the perspective of the bride whose wedding day was not ruined; and we could tell the story yet one time more, from the perspective of John, writing the story of Jesus so that the next generation of disciples could believe in Jesus:  but not today.  Today we will just note that Mary the mother of Jesus asked the Lord to take care of a bad situation, and she did not give up when the first answer she heard sounded a lot like No.  

This point is worth considering.  Many of us have had the experience of telling Jesus that we wouldn’t mind if he arranged things a certain way, and it turned out that things did not happen as we hoped:  Jesus did not make things happen that certain way.  Sometimes people find that this persuades them that there’s no point in asking.  That would be a mistake:  it’s easy to be wrong when you generalize from a sample size of one.  Yet it’s a mistake that many people have made.  Perhaps, instead, I will recognize that Jesus is the Lord, and I am not, so I should probably not presume that he has to do whatever I ask, just because I said so.  That second statement is true, yet it could make us give up on prayer just as much as the first one does.  Yet Jesus does invite us to ask for the things we need, to pray for healing, to ask for our daily bread.  

Mary pointed out to Jesus this unusual need:  here was a family celebrating a wedding, and they had run out of wine.  It’s an embarrassing moment for them.  Perhaps it is not that big a deal:  we’ve all had embarrassing moments, and we got over them.  Does this situation really call for miraculous intervention?  Jesus heard Mary’s request, and responded that it was not the right time.  Perhaps his answer was a bit more abrupt than it needed to be, when he called her “woman” and suggests that she’s out of line?  No, not really.  In first century culture, calling someone “man” or “woman” was ordinary discourse.  If Jesus had a little vehemence in his voice, then calling her “woman” becomes the equivalent of any of us feeling frustrated as we look at Mom and say, “Muh-therrrrr!!”  

Now here’s the point I want us to get:  Mary did not argue with Jesus.  She simply took action to further the request:  she told the servants to do whatever Jesus told them.  Jesus then instructed them to fill the water jars with water, and he turned the water into wine.  Then the servants told the head caterer there was more wine available.  Mary’s instruction to the servants is a good admonition to all of us:  “Do whatever Jesus tells you to do.”  But more than that:  Jesus had indicated that he was not going to do anything about the shortage of wine, but Mary did not take that as the final answer.  

Sometimes we have prayed for someone who is sick, and they have continued to decline, and in the end they died.  Sometimes we have prayed for someone, and they got better.  And sometimes we have prayed for someone, and nothing seems different:  they haven’t died (yet), but they also haven’t gotten better (yet).  Clearly what we pray for doesn’t always happen quickly, and doesn’t happen every time.  

When I was a small boy, just 5 or 6 years old, my mother would sometimes get down on one knee so that she was eyeball to eyeball with me, and she would hold my shoulders and say, “One of us is the parent, and one of us is not, and I wonder if you can tell which one is which.”  Back then I always hated that question.  But in later years I have come to appreciate it.  And I have told this story many times.

It’s such a good story, it should hardly be surprising (though I was indeed surprised) when Jesus used that question on me.  “One of us is the Lord of the universe, and one of us is not, and I wonder if you can tell which one is which.”  I don’t hate that question as much as I used to, even though it reminds me of something that part of my soul doesn’t want to know:  I don’t get to give orders to the Lord of the universe.  

Nevertheless, Jesus invites us to bring every concern and worry to him, and he will hear our prayers.  The Lord of the universe will not be coerced by our requests:  the Lord Jesus remains sovereign.  But sometimes he will do exactly what we asked, just because we asked him.  And Mary shows us that you can offer your prayer request, get told No, and persevere to ask again: and thereby change what happens today into a miracle.  Faithful persistent prayer:  Mary is the exemplar who teaches us that.

Meanwhile, in the very next book of the Bible, the Acts of the Apostles, we read about how the followers of Jesus returned to Jerusalem after Jesus’ ascension. 
 
Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away.  When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.  All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers (Acts 1:12-14).

Who was there, in this ongoing prayer meeting?  Three groups get mentioned:  eleven apostles, all of them named; and the women, only one of them named, Mary the mother of Jesus; and the brothers of Jesus, none of them named in this passage, but in other places we learn that there were four of them:  James and Joses and Simon and Jude (Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3).  

We might guess that Mary Magdalene was there, and Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus and Martha.  (Opinions vary whether Mary Magdalene was the same person as Mary of Bethany, or whether they were different people with the same given name.  Once again we don’t have sufficient evidence to prove it, either way.)  Perhaps Joanna and Susanna (Luke 8:3), and Salome (Mark 16:1) were there as well, along with other women whose names have not come down to us.  
James the brother of the Lord would eventually become the main leader of the church in Jerusalem.  (Acts 12:1-2 shows us that James son of Zebedee had been executed by order of King Herod [Acts 12:1-2], so passages like Acts 15:13-21, Acts 21:18, and Galatians 2:9 refer to James the brother of Jesus; Galatians 1:18-19 states this explicitly:  Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days, but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother.  I Corinthians 15:7 is also probably a reference to Jesus’ brother, rather than to James son of Zebedee, who would have been included among “all of the apostles” who had seen Jesus after his resurrection:  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.)  Yet at this meeting just after the resurrection, James the brother of the Lord was apparently not yet considered important enough for Luke to name him as being present.  

So.  Luke is writing about a group of perhaps twenty people, meeting for prayer in the upper room.  Luke decides to report the names of some of them, but not all of them.  He gives the names of twelve of them:  the remaining eleven apostles and Mary.  Luke names no one else among the women, nor the brothers of Jesus.  I think many of us would like to know the names of the other women, and if we did not know from reading the gospels, we would like to know the names of the brothers of Jesus.  But Luke does not tell us who they were.  This raises a question:  Why does Luke make a point of identifying Mary as being present at this formative moment of the early church, along with the apostles?

I suggest two possible answers:  because Mary may have been the source of this information, and because Mary had become known as a woman of spiritual insight.  

Luke was a personal eyewitness to nothing in the Gospel of Luke, and to nothing in Acts until the 16th chapter, where Luke apparently joins Paul’s missionary team.  "When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them" (Acts 16:10).  The author of Acts recounted all his material in the third person, up till this point; here he spoke in the first person plural:  we immediately tried, God had called us.  From here on, Luke was himself an eyewitness for much of his material.

But not before.  With some exceptions, historians are usually not eyewitnesses to the events they present to us.  Instead, they gather information from sources:  from previously written books, from inscriptions, from official reports, from personal letters; and also from interviews with people who were indeed eyewitnesses.  I have proposed elsewhere (https://james-ayers.com/2023/12/03/old-mary-luke-219/)  that Mary was still alive and was interviewed by Luke as he was gathering information for his gospel, and that she became the source for the material in his first two chapters.  I further suggest that she was the source for his knowledge about this meeting in Acts 1.  Luke wasn’t there.  In order for him to find out about this gathering of the followers of Jesus, he needed to talk to someone who was there.  And Mary was there.  

We all probably remember, from so many Christmas readings, how the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she had been chosen to bear a child, who would be the Son of the Most High.  She was perplexed by the angel’s greeting, and more perplexed as to how she, as a virgin, was going to bear a child.  The angel explained that it would be by the power of the Most High, and that nothing would be impossible for God.  And Mary believed the angel’s words, and offered her words of acceptance and affirmation of this calling:  “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

Then, when the baby had been born and was lying in the manger, when the angels came and sang to the shepherds, and the shepherds ran to Bethlehem to see this thing, and when they arrived “they made known what had been told them about this child” (Luke 2:17):  that “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (2:11). 
 
In a world where families routinely married off their early-teen girls to mid-teen boys, scholars generally suppose that Mary was about 14 when Jesus was born.  We don’t often expect that young teens will have much theological insight.  But “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (2:19).  She pondered what it meant that she had said to the angel Gabriel, “I am the servant of the Lord” and “Let it be with me according to your word.”  She pondered on what it meant that the angels had told the shepherds, who had told her, that this child she had birthed was the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord.  She probably did not understand the full meaning of all this, all in one day.  But she pondered and pondered, and understood things better as time went on.

Not that Mary was some saint – oh wait, I guess she was – but she didn’t get it right all the time.  There was the time that his family heard about how crowds were thronging around Jesus, and “they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind’ ” (Mark 3:21).  As he was teaching his disciples, his mother and brothers stayed outside and passed the word to him on the inside to ask him to come out to them (3:31-32).  The text does not tell us how Mary felt about the implied rebuke in Jesus’ words:  “Who are my mother and my brothers?”  And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (3:33-35).  But I will venture the notion that this was an occasion when Mary, now a mature woman in her mid-forties, recalled the lessons of her childhood and pondered again what it means that her son was also the Son of the Most High, and she had chosen to accept her call as the servant of the Lord, and that her son was indeed Savior and Messiah and Lord.  And then discerned, in this moment, that there is more to family than biological ties:  those who seek to follow the will of God are all brothers and sisters – and mothers! 

So I suggest that these are two possible reasons that Luke might have identified Mary by name, along with the apostles, while the rest of the people at that upper room prayer meeting were not identified:  because Mary was the source that gave Luke the account of this meeting, and because Mary’s spiritual insights had been demonstrated among the followers of Jesus, from the earliest days after the resurrection.

There is no specific text that declares this.  Yet I propose that these texts that I have quoted do give us clues that point in this direction.  And so I would ask us to see that as Jesus looked down from the cross and spoke to his mother and his cousin, there were indeed three persons in this moment.  The beloved disciple was there, and he was a real person.  Mary the mother of Jesus was there, and she was a real person.  

When I was a college boy, active in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of the IVCF sponsors pointed out to me this contrast between the apostles Peter and John.  We might notice that Simon Peter was the chief of the apostles, clearly the leader.  At the last supper, Jesus warned that the whole crew of the disciples would forsake him and flee when the soldiers came to arrest him.  Peter had been the one who protested, “Even if all the rest of them forsake you, I will stand with you, no matter what” – that is, he claimed that even though the others might not be loyal enough, might not love Jesus enough, he, Peter, would love Jesus and not run away.  This amounts to a claim on Peter’s part that he was the disciple who loved Jesus better than any of the others.  And I suppose we all remember how that story unfolded:  given the chance to proclaim that he was one of Jesus’ followers, Peter denied three times that he even knew who Jesus was.  

But in contrast to that, John had a more humble claim:  rather than an assertion of how much he loved Jesus, he simply identified himself as this disciple that Jesus loved.  In Peter and John I can see that it’s not about the courage or fearfulness with which I stand or fail to stand forth as Christ’s follower:  it’s the recognition that Jesus went first, that Jesus took the initiative, that Jesus loved me.  I am not the first disciple that Jesus loved.  I am not the only one he loved.  And I’m certainly not the best one that he loved.  Nevertheless, the key fact of John’s life –  and the key fact of my life – is not about what I said or thought or did:  it is that I am someone that Jesus loved.

And so when John wanted to pass along the story of his time with Jesus, what would he say?  Would he focus on himself, writing about what he did, what he thought, what he said?  Or would he choose, instead, simply to note that he was someone that Jesus loved?  

There is more to a life than that, of course. There are family relationships, and friendships, connections between people that are sustained over long periods of time. There are actions that may take just a brief amount of time, which nevertheless have effects that endure for years or lifetimes. There are events that seem fairly inconsequential, yet they somehow reveal a detail that enables us to see a glimpse of some facet of a person’s personality. 

We sometimes puzzle about the life of Jesus, how we have just a few brief stories about when he was a baby, and one incident from when he was twelve years old, and then some material from a short period of his life, perhaps three years long, about the things he said and did when he was in public ministry. We would like to know a lot more. There are so many questions we’d like to have answers for. But this is what we have.

There are two schools of thought as to when the Gospel of John was written: one side proposes it was about the year 65, and the other suggests it was about the year 90. Scholars feel pretty confident that the year of Jesus’ death was 30 AD. So the Gospel of John got published either 35 or 60 years later: that is, when John was a senior citizen of about 50 – which when an average life expectancy might have been 40 would indeed make you a senior citizen. Or when John was a venerable elder, a man of 75: which would have been an age that might not seem all that significant to us today, but would be quite noteworthy in New Testament times.

When John recounted his story of his time with Jesus, he included almost nothing at all about himself. He doesn’t seem to have asked “What should I tell them about what my childhood was like?” Or “What are the lessons about life that I have learned over the most recent decade of my life?” Instead, he gave us his insider’s perspective about these three years of Jesus ministry. The most significant thing he tells us about himself is that he was someone whom Jesus loved.

Even so, if we take seriously the notion that “the disciple that Jesus loved” was in fact the author of this gospel, John the Apostle, then each mention of the beloved disciple is a bit of autobiography. Indeed, there is more autobiography here than in any of the other three gospels, which have almost none. In Matthew there is a tax collector named Matthew who becomes an apostle, and there is an obscure verse at the end of the “Parables of the Kingdom” discourse that is perhaps an oblique self-reference (Matthew 13:52). In Mark there is nothing at all, unless the speculation of some scholars is correct that Mark was the young man nearly caught by the soldiers when Jesus was arrested (Mark 14:51-52). We catch a glimpse of Luke in his introductory message to Theophilus, at the beginnings of both Luke and Acts, and in the “we passages” in Acts (Acts 16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-8, 27:1-28:15).

In John 21 we read how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb of Jesus on the first day of the week, and found it empty, and ran to tell the other disciples. Peter and the disciple that Jesus loved then ran to the tomb, and – here is a fascinating little detail – that unnamed disciple outran Peter and got to the tomb first. Why is that line there? It serves no religious purpose. There isn’t any doctrine of Christian running that needs to be taught. There isn’t any moral lesson to be emphasized about why a good Christian will always run fast. The incident is simply a detail that doesn’t matter to anyone – unless, perhaps, it matters to you, because that other runner who won the race was you, so when you wrote up this event, several decades later, you still felt the warm glow of having outrun Simon Peter in that footrace.

Here is the action that the beloved disciple took, in response to Jesus’ words: from that hour he took her into his own home. He might have offered even a little more detail: “And so he gave her a place in his own home for the rest of her life.” Or even, “And so he gave her a place in his own home for the rest of her life, another eleven years.” It would be nice for John to have included a detail or two that way. Still, the little he said tells us a few things. First, that John had a home. It might have been a room in the home of his father, Zebedee, who ran a successful fishing business, large enough that there were hired men who worked for him. Or it might have been a small cottage on the larger property, a house that was uniquely John’s own, built by John and his father and brothers and maybe a few cousins, maybe so that 16-year-old John and his bride would have a place of their own. Whatever the details of the housing arrangement may have been, John took seriously the instruction from Jesus to take care of his mother.

In a culture and economy that expected men to be in charge and thereby granted not much autonomy to women, a widow had no automatic means of support. The early church eventually set up a systematic process for making sure that widows with no other support got a daily food basket; but at the beginning when they hadn’t figured out all the details, there were some rough spots.

Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.  And the Twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.  Therefore, brothers and sisters, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task,  while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.”  What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch.  They had these men stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them. (Acts 6:1-6).

There are several things here that we should take note of. First, we see that the church was running a program of distribution of food to the widows. The church had not yet begun to include Gentiles, but did include Jews who had grown up in other places, and mostly spoke Greek, and Jews who had grown up in Judea and Galilee, and mostly spoke Aramaic in everyday conversation, and Hebrew in the synagogue. (Roughly speaking, Hebrew was the language of Israel in the time of most of the books of the Old Testament; but languages change over time. By the time of the New Testament, it had evolved into Aramaic. A good analogy can be had by comparing the King James text with any modern translation. Both versions are obviously English, but the way people talk today in the early 2000s is not the same as how people talked when the King James was translated, the early 1600s.) So when the Aramaic-speaking Jews brought food baskets to widows, they brought them to the widows they knew about: the Aramaic-speaking widows. Some of the Greek-speaking Jews complained: “Hey! What about the Greek-speaking widows? Why are you ignoring them!”

Of course, they could have dealt with that better. They could have said, “You know, there are some Greek-speaking widows you probably don’t know about, but they could really use the help.” They could have said, “I wonder if some of our Greek-speaking brothers and sisters could join your team, to help make sure that all the widows, no matter what group they’re part of, get enough to eat.” But, like so many of us throughout history, when something doesn’t happen right, our first impulse is to complain. In the end, though, everyone got it sorted out, and they appointed deacons to run the program and see to it that all the widows were taken care of.

That program wasn’t running, though, when Jesus was dying of crucifixion. And so it seems that Jesus assigned the care for his mother to his 16-year-old cousin. Did John want this responsibility? Perhaps John had his eye on a girl back in Galilee, maybe her name was Deborah, and the matchmaker was in the process of negotiating with John’s parents and Deborah’s parents about the suitability of this match, and John was daydreaming about honeymooning in that little cottage his family had built for him, and he saw that if he and his bride were living in a one-room cottage with his elderly aunt right there, that would certainly put a crimp in his style.

Yet the one thing John had known about Jesus for all his life was this: Jesus loved him. And Jesus had assigned him to care for his Aunt Mary, Jesus’ mother.

Jesus loved his mother. Jesus loved this beloved disciple. And Jesus knew that for both of them, watching him die was horrible. Even though Jesus believed that the Father would raise him from the dead on the third day, even though he had told his disciples exactly that on several occasions, they had been baffled by that pronouncement. And Jesus knew that even after the resurrection, he was not going to stick around: he was going to ascend into heaven, and take his seat at the right hand of the Father. He is asking his beloved cousin, his disciple, to take care of his mother. Yet notice this: he is also asking his beloved mother, a spiritual leader in her own right, to take care of his disciple. The instruction to both of them is the same.

Jesus was in the agony of great physical pain. As we’ll see next week, he was also in the agony of great spiritual pain, leading to his haunting words from the cross: “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” Yet even in the midst of this searing torture, he looks at these two people he loves, and indicates that they can help each other. It is so often the case, in our own trials and sorrows, that helping someone else also somehow eases the pain we have suffered. Jesus, dying on the cross, was saving the world. But he also was saving mother Mary and cousin John. Jesus saves the great sweep of humanity, across the ages: and he also saves you and me.

Next week: My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?