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Mary at Cana
In John’s Gospel, like Luke’s, the mother of Jesus has a special role to play in the story of salvation. Here there are no birth narratives; she appears just twice in the life of Jesus as an adult, but they are the pivotal moments of John’s Gospel. She is not named, which is something of a mystery for the biblical interpreter. Why is this so? The first time we meet the mother of Jesus in John is at the wedding in Cana at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the occasion of his first miracle:
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 you and to me? 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 chief steward.’ So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward 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. After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples; and they remained there a few days.
(John 2.1–12)
What do we find out from this passage? First, we notice that Jesus is somewhat reluctant to respond to Mary’s prompting. ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me’ is from a Hebrew idiom which could be translated, ‘Woman, what has that got to do with us?’ His attention is focused on looking forward to his ‘hour’, a word related to the hour of a painful birth, which in the Gospel of John is a metaphor for the crucifixion. John’s Gospel refers several times to Christian life as being ‘born again’ in the Spirit, especially in the dialogue with Nicodemus in chapter 3. John 16.21 likens the death of Jesus to a painful birth after which there is joy. Therefore, at Cana Jesus sounds surprised that he is being asked to do this miracle well in advance of the crucifixion.
Perhaps his question could be interpreted as something along these lines: ‘Do you realize that if my ministry begins here, we will have set foot on the road that leads to the cross?’ Jesus’ response in changing the water into wine is an anticipation of his suffering on the cross which will turn into the victory of the resurrection. The miracle anticipates the joyous feast that will occur at the resurrection, which will be like a wedding; another common theme in John’s Gospel is the identification of Jesus as the Bridegroom (refer also to Revelation 19.9: ‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’). The wine also has eucharistic connotations, in the same way as the miracle of the bread and fish in John 6.1–14. Jesus is both the ‘Bread of Life’ (6.25–35) and the ‘True Vine’ (15.1–8), the source of the elements of the Eucharist.
The wedding at Cana stands at the beginning of the ministry, but it is also a symbolic image of its end: it occurs ‘on the third day’. Is the evangelist simply referring to Tuesday here, the third day of the Jewish week? Nowhere in the New Testament is the day of the week mentioned in a setting for a story, except for the Sabbath and the first day of the week; in those cases, the day of the week is relevant to the story. All other instances of ‘on the third day’ in the New Testament refer to the resurrection, although none of these are in John. It has been suggested that the use of the expression is quite mundane, as it follows on from John’s previous reference to the ‘next day’ in the first chapter (John 1.29, 35, 43), but it is not easy to see why the third day is mentioned here when it seems to be the fifth in the sequence. Therefore, it is likely that ‘on the third day’ refers forward to the resurrection.
The drinking of wine is a symbol of resurrection and the coming of the Messianic Kingdom, as in the synoptic traditions of the Last Supper, where Jesus says that he will not drink wine again until these events (Matt. 26.29; Mark 14.25; Luke 22.18). Isaiah 25.6–8 speaks of God’s feast of deliverance on the mountain of Zion:
On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
He will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the LORD has spoken.
Jesus’ reply to Mary’s request is one of the most debated verses in the New Testament; it is enigmatic and invites a variety of responses. First, it seems to align with the reservations in Mark’s Gospel about the importance of Mary, and early Church commentators saw it as keeping Mary in her place (for example, Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.16.7). Yet, this was a somewhat misogynistic and unnecessary interpretation: the only clear fact that we can draw from the passage is that Jesus’ mother is associated with this ‘hour’, as she appears both here and at the cross. As the mother of Jesus, she will experience the painful but joyful birth that is the crucifixion and resurrection, and she is portrayed as the person who initiates the journey to the cross.
Second, we notice that Jesus addresses his mother ‘Woman’, which sounds odd in English; it does not necessarily suggest a dismissive tone, however, and Jesus uses the expression again, to his mother at the cross (19.26) and to Mary Magdalene in the garden of the resurrection (20.15). Great tenderness is implied as both Mary and Mary Magdalene are struggling with the terrible events of his execution and death. It has been suggested that, in both cases, ‘Woman’ may be a reference back to the archetypal ‘woman’ of the Bible: Eve. John’s Gospel is the story of rebirth, not just of individuals but of the whole of creation. The prologue relates to Genesis, and so it is not unreasonable to see this theme reflected elsewhere in John. Thus, the later theological speculation that Mary is the new Eve of a renewed creation, a concept introduced by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century, might be seen to have a foundation in John’s Gospel, although we can only infer the relationship of Mary to Eve as it is not explicit there. One could say the same thing about Mary Magdalene, as she meets the risen Jesus in a garden, reminding us of the original garden in Eden. Perhaps we should beware of making too much of John’s use of ‘Woman’, as it is also used by Jesus to address the Samaritan woman in John 4.21 and the woman taken in adultery in 8.10. Yet, with exception of the woman taken in adultery (who was probably not included in the original version of John’s Gospel as the passage does not appear in the oldest versions), we have three remarkable women addressed in this way, as the Samaritan woman was an important evangelist in her own community.
Third, we note that Jesus carries out the miracle instigated by his mother and she tells the servants to obey him. This has also become the basis of later theology: the belief that Mary is an intercessor. In other words, if we pray to her, she will ask Jesus to listen to our prayers and respond to them, just as she represented the wedding host when he had no wine. The idea that we have recourse to an intercessor with Jesus is generally unacceptable to Protestants, but Mary and other saints fulfilling this role is a traditional theme in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. It is not possible to ascribe the theology of intercession to the writer of John, but what he has given us is the image of Jesus listening to his mother and responding to her, despite what can be read as his initial reservations.
It is noteworthy that two very prominent people in John’s Gospel – the mother of Jesus and the disciple whom Jesus loved – appear to remain anonymous in this gospel. It is not possible for us to ever fully know why this was the case. A popular answer is that they are symbolic characters, more important for what they represented than for the way in which they were named. However, there is a second possibility which may be added to the first. This is that their names and identities had become complicated in the traditions that fed into the final version of John’s Gospel. As we will see, there may have been more than one way of describing Mary. There may also have been one or more candidate for the beloved disciple, or a preferred beloved disciple may have been replaced by another in the tradition. John’s Gospel could have avoided any confusion or controversy on these questions by leaving the names out and allowing their symbolic function to be emphasized.
Finally, we see again the mother and the brothers of Jesus mentioned as a group. In John 2.12, they accompany Jesus and the disciples from Cana to Capernaum.
Mary at the Cross
John’s Passion narrative diverges from those in the synoptic gospels. In John, the crucifixion occurs on the day of the Passover feast rather than the day after it. The people observing the crucifixion now come closer, near enough to be in communication with Jesus (John 19.25–27). The only named follower of Jesus observing the crucifixion who can also be found in the synoptic accounts would appear to be Mary Magdalene. The passage narrating the presence of Mary at the cross in John 19.25–27 reads:
Meanwhile, standing near 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 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.
Jesus has arrived at his ‘hour’ and his mother is present. He speaks from the cross in order to bring the beloved disciple and his mother together into a new relationship. This is quite intriguing, and there has been much debate about the meaning of this. Surely if Jesus had brothers who were also the children of Mary, he would have had no need to place his mother in the care of another person. This point was made by those early Church fathers who argued for the perpetual virginity of Mary, such as Origen (Commentary on John 1.6) and Jerome (On the Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary 15).
Yet of course the scene goes far beyond Jesus pragmatically making provision for his mother. It is full of theological significance. And so Church tradition has viewed this as a symbolic depiction of the new family of the Church brought into being by the cross. The beloved disciple is the ideal witness in John’s gospel and his relationship with Jesus’ mother means that he now has a kinship relationship with Jesus. We are reminded again of Mark 3.35 and its relationship with Luke 1–2:
Mark 3.35: The disciples are Jesus’ family because they ‘do the will of God’ – in Mark’s version Mary is not important in her own right;
Luke 1–2: Mary is the forerunner and prototype of all those who hear God’s word and bring Christ into the world;
John 19.26–27: The beloved disciple is drawn into a family relationship with Jesus by becoming the son of Mary.
Therefore, in Luke and John, Mary’s role has greater significance than it does in Mark.
To say that Church tradition regards John 19.25–27 as having symbolic significance does not mean that it has been viewed as unhistorical by the Churches, as Christian tradition generally sees symbol and history as coming together in the New Testament story of Jesus. However, modern biblical scholarship has been less inclined to accept this as history, but rather to stress its theological basis and to explore what kind of symbols might be involved. After all, in the synoptic gospels, this scene is absent, the beloved disciple does not appear anywhere, and the women who observe the crucifixion are far off and unable to hear Jesus’ words. John’s version, therefore, must be in the form that it is for a reason. The Gospel of John abounds with theological ideas and it describes Christ as the spiritual centre of Christianity with many metaphors such as Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life; the True Vine; the Bread of Life; the Living Water, and so the crucifixion scene is probably also symbolic. This is not to say that John’s Gospel contains no history; this is a popular contention that has been challenged in recent decades. However, it does suggest that this Gospel is concerned even more so than the synoptic gospels with telling us who Jesus is for Christians rather than with the biographical details of his life.
The relationship between Mary and the beloved disciple has led the Catholic Church to expand on its view of her as the type and forerunner of the Church, to say that she is also the ‘Mother of the Church’. This was declared during the Second Vatican Council by Pope Paul VI in 1964 (although it is an ancient title, not a new one). The Church of believers, the beloved disciples through history, find their kinship with Jesus through Mary as their mother just as the original beloved disciple did. It is important not to forget, however, that the beloved disciple has a special privilege as the witness who has handed down the truth of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection; he is not just ‘every disciple’. Nevertheless, one can see him as the prototype of believers in the same way as Mary is for Luke. This then leads to the Catholic understanding of Mary as Mother of the Church. It can be contrasted to Mark’s Gospel, in which disciples are Jesus’ kin through their believing and doing the will of God and need no connection to Mary. However, the writer of John’s Gospel sees the mother of Jesus as crucial to the family relationship of believers which is forged at the cross. Perhaps Mark wrote what he did in opposition to the view already widespread that Mary and the brothers were somehow central to faith in Jesus, which survives in John’s Gospel only with respect to Mary.
Given that the author of John’s Gospel does not name the mother of Jesus as Mary, does he regard her as a real human being at all? We saw in an earlier chapter that some apocryphal gospels equated the mother of Christ with Wisdom, or an incarnation of the Archangel Michael, or the Holy Spirit. Could she be here in John’s Gospel a depiction of the Holy Spirit inspiring Jesus and the beloved disciple? This seems unlikely, as the Holy Spirit is described elsewhere in John 14.15–31 as the ‘Advocate’ with no mention of the mother of Jesus. Nevertheless, these other metaphorical allusions have led some people to ask whether John’s ‘mother of Jesus’ is meant to be the historical Mary or purely a symbolic figure. She may be a symbolic construct in the same way as she appears to be in the birth narratives in Luke. However, even there we found some basic details that stand behind the legendary material: that Mary really was the mother of Jesus, that she was based in Nazareth during his childhood, and that she understood her son to have a claim to the line of David. Can we, in the same way, assume that the writer of John’s Gospel inherited a tradition that she was present at the crucifixion, which he may have embellished?
Mary of Clopas
One of the women at the cross in John 19.25–27 has been traditionally referred to as ‘Mary the wife of Clopas’. The original Greek is ‘Mary of Clopas’ and so it could be translated as the mother, wife, or daughter of Clopas. The best translation is probably ‘Clopas’ Mary’, or even ‘Mary of Clopas’ household’, although that does not establish their exact relationship.
Who was Mary of Clopas? What we can reject at the outset is the idea that she has simply been inserted because someone somewhere passed on a memory that she was present in the same way as the women mentioned in just one of the synoptic gospels, Salome (in Mark), the mother of the sons of Zebedee (in Matthew), or Joanna (in Luke). The names of the women at the cross in all four gospels are not there by accident; they serve a purpose. After all, the gospels attest that there were more women than those named in the texts. Mary of Clopas has earned her place.
There are two things that Church tradition remembered about Clopas. We find them in Eusebius (History of the Church 3.11 and 4.22), who quotes the second-century writer known as Hegesippus, of whom no works survive. They are that (1) Clopas was the brother of Joseph, which means that Mary wife of Clopas was Mary’s sister-in-law; (2) Clopas was also the father of Symeon, the leader of the Jerusalem Church after James. Symeon (the same name as Simon, but nearer to the Hebrew original) would therefore have been a cousin of Jesus.
The first of these traditions makes sense when we consider what early Christian interpreters would have made of John’s description of the presence of the mother of Jesus at the cross with her sister. Given that we know that Jesus’ mother was named Mary, then how could her sister also be called Mary? Even in ancient families, this was unlikely. Therefore, it was concluded that she must have been her sister-in-law, a logical deduction to make although it may not have been the intention of the writer of John’s Gospel.
The second of these traditions, that Clopas was the father of Symeon, the second leader at Jerusalem, is more illuminating as it provides an answer to what might strike the modern reader as mysterious, just as much as it could have done to an ancient one. Why is a previously unknown person, Mary of Clopas, placed at such an important position in this gospel? Why is she named among all the possible women when she has no place in the synoptic accounts? Clopas is not mentioned until this point in John and there were so many other people more important in the ministry of Jesus.
This question can also be asked of Luke’s Gospel, where someone called Cleopas (24.18) is the first person to be credited with seeing the risen Jesus in that gospel, but this is the first and only time we ever hear of him. He is almost certainly the same person as Clopas: Cleopas is probably the Greek equivalent of the Aramaic Clopas. There are parallel traditions behind Luke and John (which both include, for example, the sisters Mary and Martha; a Lazarus associated with resurrection; Peter at the tomb). Why is Cleopas in Luke given the privilege of a resurrection appearance, rather than Peter/Cephas, whom we know from 1 Corinthians 15.5 was regarded as the first apostle to see the risen Christ (this is also implied in Mark 16.7 and Luke 24.34)?
However, thanks to Hegesippus and Eusebius, there is an answer to this mystery: Cleopas or Clopas (we will refer to him as Clopas from now on) was the father of the Jerusalem Church’s second leader (and long-time leader, according to Eusebius 3.22), at a time when the gospels of Luke and John were being compiled. This does explain his importance and his appearance in the texts.
It would be reasonable to assume that Symeon, bishop of Jerusalem apparently from about 62 CE to the end of the century (the reign of Trajan), was either not born or very young at the time of the crucifixion. Eusebius explains that his status as the cousin of Jesus led to him receiving the honour of being Jerusalem’s second bishop, the successor to James the brother of Jesus. Presumably, for him to be given such an important position, he needed to have a true apostle as a father, one that could confirm his right to it. This is a good reason for Clopas appearing in gospels written well after the time of the change of leadership. This should not imply that Clopas’ status as a witness to the resurrection was invented; we know from 1 Corinthians 15 that there were many such witnesses, and there is every likelihood that he was one. But the choosing of his son Symeon as Jerusalem Church leader explains why Clopas was singled out among the many to feature in the gospel accounts.
The answer that Hegesippus provides is the best answer to the riddle of the appearance of Clopas at such important points in the gospels; indeed, it is the only one we have.
In John’s Gospel we have identified that:
· The mother of Jesus is identified as a key person at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry; Jesus’ brothers too encourage him to show his power (see Chapter 7);
· The mother of Jesus is intimately associated with Jesus’ ‘hour’, that is, the crucifixion seen as a new birth which is painful but, because of the resurrection, ultimately joyful, and the basis and inspiration for new births of Christians in the Spirit;
· The mother of Jesus is the pivotal member of a new family of believers for whom the ‘beloved disciple’, the ideal witness to Jesus’ truth, is a prototype; therefore, taking the mother of Jesus into one’s home seems to be the equivalent of entering the kinship of Jesus;
· The sudden appearance of Clopas in the narrative at the cross was based on the rising to prominence of his son, Symeon, as the second leader (or bishop) of the Jerusalem Church.
Yet, the text does not say that Mary was Clopas’ wife; this is only inferred from it. In a later chapter, we will investigate further the identity of this Mary, who is apparently one of three Marys at the cross in John’s Gospel: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Clopas.