Behold, your Mother!
I had a particularly difficult talk with my oldest son this week, just a few days after Mother’s Day. He’s only five years old, but sometimes he makes decisions that make you wonder if he’s lost his brain. In the middle of being punished and sent to his room, he said some incredibly rude things to my wife. The type of things that require a father, after a long day of work, to trudge upstairs to talk to him on his bed about why he cannot say his mom is the worst mother ever, and that he’s never coming back downstairs again… The Mother’s Day artwork he had made her over the weekend was still hanging up in the kitchen.
I began our talk by asking him, “Do you know what the Bible says about moms and dads?” He shook his head no. I said the Ten Commandments tell us that we need to honor our father and mother. And then we spent a few minutes talking about what honoring someone means. It means to show respect, to be kind, and to care for them, because God has given them a special role in our lives. Everybody has a mom and a dad. And children have a special role to play in caring for them.
I shared this with him and then asked him the question: “Do you feel like saying those unkind things was honoring to your mom?” He shook his head no. And then we talked about what Jesus would have done.
It was at this point that a story popped into my head that I hadn’t really considered before in this context: the story of Jesus hanging on the cross, talking to John. This is obviously his point of greatest anguish. He’s facing death. The normal and natural thing for any of us to do would be to think of ourselves, to consider our own fate, to be worried about ourselves.
Not Jesus. Jesus used this moment to make arrangements for his mother. He looked down from the cross and saw Mary standing there with John, the only disciple present (more on that in a minute). To his mother, he said, “Woman, behold, your son.” To John, “Behold, your mother.” And John, the Gospel tells us, took her into his own home from that hour (John 19:26–27).
More than a goodbye…
What Jesus was doing, in the culture of that time, is transferring a responsibility that he himself, as the oldest son, had: to provide and care for his mother, with his father presumably dead at this point. He transfers that responsibility to John, the one the Gospels say is the disciple whom he loved.
This was not a sentimental gesture. In first-century Judaism, the eldest son was customarily responsible for the material care of a widowed mother, a duty that came from the fifth commandment itself. Joseph is absent from the Gospels after Jesus’s twelfth year and is presumed by many to be dead. As eldest, Jesus would have been expected to provide for his mother in old age. The commandment to honor your father and mother was never just about tone of voice or speaking respectfully. The command also included material provision when parents grew old and could no longer provide for themselves.
The natural successors would have been his brothers, but his brothers did not believe in him at this point in the story and none were present at the cross. James would later convert after the resurrection but in this moment, none of Mary’s sons are present to take responsibility for her.
So Jesus transferred the duty to the disciple who stayed. Jesus, in his final moments, honored the fifth commandment.
Where did all the disciples go?
Reading this story again this week, I was struck by the fact John was the ONLY disciple at the cross. His mother being there makes perfect sense. I am sure for any mom out there reading this, that’s not surprising. While it would have been the most heart-wrenching thing to see, being present to provide even just a little solace to your dying child seems very natural. I bet it would have taken a whole legion of Roman soldiers to keep Mary from being at the cross.
The disciples, however, are all absent. Why? In all likelihood, they were scared. They knew they would have been seen as potential heirs to the legacy of Jesus, people who would continue his rebellion and uprising that the Roman officials were so keen to keep quiet. In that framing, you can see why the disciples fled. Their fear was rational. Identification with him at the wrong moment carried the same penalty he was paying.
All four Gospel writers detail this:
Matthew: “Then all the disciples left him and fled” (Matthew 26:56).
Mark: “Then everyone deserted him and fled.” (Mark 14:50).
Luke shows us Peter following “at a distance,” and then denying Jesus three times by the courtyard fire before the rooster crowed for fear of being linked to Jesus. (Luke 22:54–62).
And John remembers Jesus predicting the whole thing on the night he was arrested: “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” (John 16:32).
The disciples scattered in order to avoid what seemed to them certain death. But not John. For whatever reason, John did not fear death, or at least did not allow his fear of death to so intimidate him as to avoid being with Christ during his hour of anguish and moment of need. Instead, he held fast.
The violent irony…
What is ironic here is the inversion. All the disciples who avoided the cross for fear of further persecution were so convinced by the resurrection that they spent the rest of their lives building the Kingdom of the man who had been resurrected. And nearly all of them ultimately paid for it with their lives, in violent deaths, by the very authorities they once fled.
Here is the best I could find on each of them. Most of these accounts come from later traditions rather than from Scripture itself, so I can’t vouch for specifics but see if you can spot the overall pattern:
Peter — crucified upside down in Rome under Nero, around AD 64–67.
Andrew — crucified at Patras, Greece.
James son of Zebedee — beheaded by Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem, AD 44. This is the only martyrdom recorded in the New Testament itself (Acts 12:1–2).
Philip — crucified or hanged at Hierapolis in modern Turkey.
Bartholomew — flayed alive and beheaded in Armenia.
Matthew — killed in Ethiopia or Persia, possibly with a halberd.
Thomas — speared to death near Chennai, India, around AD 72.
James son of Alphaeus — stoned and clubbed.
Thaddaeus / Jude — killed in Persia or Armenia.
Simon the Zealot — cut in two, or crucified in Persia or Britain.
Matthias (the replacement for Judas) — stoned.
Two additional:
Paul — beheaded in Rome under Nero, around AD 64–67.
James the brother of Jesus — thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple and clubbed to death in Jerusalem, around AD 62.
What about John?
Then there is an old tradition, that Rome tried to kill John but he was protected. The account goes that they threw him into a vat of boiling oil at the Latin Gate in Rome, and he emerged unharmed. He was then exiled to Patmos, where he received the visions we now call Revelation. There is a church in Rome that still marks the supposed spot.
I cannot tell you whether the oil is literal or legend. There is no mention of it in the New Testament itself. What I can tell you is that it would be strange if Rome, having executed every other apostle they could get their hands on, simply never tried with John. So the tradition goes that they tried, and the disciple who did not fear death was preserved through it. He was exiled rather than executed, and he died of old age around the year AD 100, an old man at last.
Whatever happened, you can see the pattern unfold. Those who scattered received opportunities for redemption and all met death bravely for the Lord. John was spared that end. We cannot know for sure whether it was his courage to be at the cross, or his sacred duty to be with Mary and provide for her, or both, that gave him this shroud of protection.
What we do know is, the one not afraid to die is the one spared from it. More than that, he was also given the most sacred responsibility of caring for the woman who gave birth to Christ. There was great honor bestowed on John in being given the responsibility to honor Christ’s mother, Mary.
The Buried Commandment
Reflecting on this story, made me realize how the fifth commandment is so often treated as a throwaway, irrelevant in today’s world. Overlooked among commands not to murder or lie.
This downplaying is to our detriment. The triad of mother, father, and child is the most fundamental relationship in society. It is a symbiotic one that moves through a life cycle. Children, at their earliest moments, unable to provide for themselves, must be nourished by their mothers. Mothers, while bearing and raising children, depend on their husbands. And husbands, once no longer able to provide, must relinquish this holy role to their children. In this unity, we see God’s plan for honor, protection, and provision.
We all live inside this cycle, it is how all of us enter the world. No one has ever come from anything but one man and one woman. Every child has but one mother and one father. It is this commandment and truth that Christ concerned himself with at his moment of death.
Jesus, with nails through his wrists and the weight of the world’s sin on his shoulders, was busy making arrangements for the care of his mother.
Can we honor the fifth Commandment today?
We should never take lightly what it means to deprive a child of their ability to walk in Christ’s footsteps. Unfortunately, we live in a society that has increasingly tried to do just that by trivializing and redefining the role of Mothers and Fathers entirely.
Just in the last several weeks I have seen a “single mother by choice” ask for affirmation on Instagram and divorced couples throwing parties to celebrate the death of their family.
The woman who does not bind herself through marriage to the father of her child, puts herself at much greater risk for the father to be absent, and for her son to never see what Jesus saw modeled. Christ no doubt watched Joseph provide for their family. That example of provision is what he stepped into as he came into his own.
The man who does not commit to marriage before creating life is much less likely to shoulder the responsibilities he has to his wife and mother of their children. This dishonors God’s design and leaves children with no example and no compass. We can all look around and feel the effects of this.
Newer family “innovations” have made it even worse. Reproductive technologies now allow adults (many in same sex relationships) to purchase these roles of Mother and Father. Eggs and sperm are bought, children are created in a petri dish, placed in surrogate wombs, and the resulting children are delivered intentionally deprived of their mother, father, or both. These children are orphaned by design. What society once mourned as tragedy is now being celebrated as “progress”. How can we consider ourselves a just society when we are creating children who are structurally unable to live out the fifth commandment, because their mother or father has been erased? The child knows them, if at all, as “donor number 6457”, “gestational carrier”, or “Daddy’s special helper”.
As Christians, we must believe that all Scripture has a purpose, and that it holds deep truths that we cast away at our great peril. This moment at the cross, even as I teach it to my five-year-old son thousands of years later, is not merely descriptive of one particular situation where a Jewish man dying on a cross happened to have a mother to care for. It is prescriptive of a biological reality we all must honor. It explains a unique and precious bond that exists between mother, father, and child, and that bond creates real responsibilities on all parties, cycling at different points in life to care, provide, love, and sacrifice for one another.
Have we “progressed” past needing this commandment? Has our modern definition of family that treats these roles and bonds as optional left us happier and more connected?
I think it is exactly the opposite. If we read the entire command, it is unique in its attachment to a promise: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”
Paul underlines this in his letter to the Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”
The bottom line is this: the health of our children, the care of our parents, and our flourishing as a society, depend on the sacrificial structure of the family. They depend on our obedience to the fifth commandment.
Jesus modeled that in his final moments. We would all do well to notice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
