Jesus from the cross gave Mary to John as his mother and John to Mary as her son. The tradition speaks of the “Seven Last Words (or Sayings) from the Cross” of Our Lord. This gift of each to the other is counted as the third such “word.” These “words” were not spontaneous but deliberate, providential, and full of meaning. Indeed, this “word” effected what it said. From that time on, Mary lived in the household of John (John 19:27).
The date was around A.D. 33. We do not know exactly when Mary passed from this life, but tradition allows us to date it as late as A.D. 60 to 65. We also learn from tradition and evidence that Mary moved with John to a small house outside the city of Ephesus. So Mary lived with John perhaps as long as thirty years, and during this time John, of course, as an apostle, would have been constantly preaching the gospel of Christ. Would Mary’s presence in his household have affected how John approached this task of explaining the life of Jesus to others?
The moment we raise this question, we see that it must be so. The alternative—that John would just carry on as if Mary didn’t exist, as if she hadn’t known Our Lord already for more than three decades prior to the relatively brief time John knew him, as if Mary weren’t his adoptive mother—is absurd.
We are deeply influenced by the great persons we know. I knew Fr. Richard John Neuhaus personally and spent perhaps five full days with him in my life, mostly during a pilgrimage to Rome. Those days left an indelible impression me. They changed everything that I have perceived and thought about since then. The apostles, of course, were changed inestimably by their three years with Our Lord.
You or I would be changed by one day with Mary. John surely would have been changed by years with her. John had a refined, contemplative soul, marked by great purity, which would have made him especially sensitive to Our Lady’s intimations.
The question then suggests itself: is this influence of Mary upon John discernible in the Gospel of John? I like to think of it not so much as influence but rather as unanimity. They were “of one spirit and one mind” (Phil. 2:2). How might such a unanimity have revealed itself in John’s Gospel?
I explore this question in my recent book, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John (Regnery Gateway), which consists of a new translation, commentary, and essays that introduce the book as a whole and each chapter, as well as an appendix that refutes the recent, universalist translation of the New Testament by David Bentley Hart.
Mary’s self-knowledge
What did I find in my investigation? John’s Gospel has always been recognized as quite different from the other three gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are together called the “synoptic” Gospels, synoptic coming from Greek words meaning “seeing things (opsis) in the same way (syn).” Many of the distinctive features of John’s Gospel make sense on this hypothesis of his being “one spirit and one mind” with Mary.
However, to see that this is so, we need to appreciate some facts about Mary. She understood from the moment of Our Lord’s conception that she was carrying God incarnate within her. She understood this because an angel told her who invoked the name “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.” She understood also, because of the implication, that any “holy offspring” conceived through the agency of the Holy Spirit would himself be divine.
Furthermore, it makes sense that Mary would need to know this. Mary could not have given her free consent to the divine “marriage proposal” that was the Annunciation had she not understood that, through her fiat, divine nature was to be joined with human nature. She needed to consent with playing a close role in the redemption of humankind.
Also, she would have been instrumentalized, and put at extreme risk of sacrilege, if she were carrying the God-man within her and yet were to mistakenly believed herself to be carrying a merely human child. That would be as if a eucharistic minister gave someone a pyx with the Blessed Sacrament within, asking him to take it somewhere and yet without explaining that it contained a consecrated host, something infinitely greater than a sliver of bread.
Once we appreciate this fact, we see that Mary had started meditating on the divinity of Jesus fully thirty years before his public ministry began. This fact has tremendous implications for what she would perceive and remember about the life of Christ.
The apostles in contrast had little idea from the start who Jesus was. The Gospel of Mark especially, but the other synoptics also, depicts the apostles as confused and bewildered. Even after Jesus calms the storm at sea they still ask, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41).
Just before the Passion, Peter seems to get it right, but then he immediately falls back to a human view—“Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8:33)—and ends up abandoning Our Lord. The synoptic Gospels, which tell the life of Christ from the point of view of the apostles, seem to revel in showing their flaws and misunderstandings.
Faith in her son’s divinity
But in John’s Gospel, from the start the divinity of Jesus is asserted, implicitly but clearly, by Mary. “They are out of wine” she says (2:3). Think about it: what is she suggesting that he do? “Do whatever he tells you,” she says to the servants (2:5).
What does she think he might say to them? After all, it was a large wedding feast. The wine had run out. Large quantities of wine were needed—right then. Was Jesus going to tell them to hire some wagons, drive to Jerusalem, and load up with wineskins? Clearly, the only remedy possible was the immediate creation of wine. (Jesus created the equivalent of 800 bottles, it turns out, which also gives us an idea of the size of the feast.)
Mary confidently anticipates this act of creation and asks for it. Our Lord’s “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come” (2:4), which looks at first like a rebuke, makes it clear that, but for Mary’s intervention, that miracle would not have been performed.
Only God can create; Mary had unwavering faith that Jesus could create; ergo, she had unwavering faith that Jesus was God. John takes care to say that this was the first public miracle of Our Lord. Its origin was the complete faith of Mary in Our Lord’s divinity.
Now, let’s pause to consider what it means that John picked this miracle to put at the start of his Gospel. The other Gospel writers do not do this. John himself tells us later that he is impressed and almost overwhelmed by the problem of what to select, to tell people about Jesus: if everything Jesus did were written down, he tells us, it is doubtful that there would be room enough in the entire world to contain all the books that would be necessary (John 21:25).
So John is aware he has limited space, and he can pick only a few things. Therefore, what he does pick tells us something about how he sees things and how we should interpret his Gospel. As his starting point, he picks this miracle initiated by Mary’s petition and realized by her faith. And then Mary’s words: “Do whatever he tells you”—the last words spoken by Mary in the Gospel, extend over the rest of the narrative.
Two contemplative souls
Other characteristics of John’s Gospel can be explained in a similar way. Consider the fact of the so-called Prologue, “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is a profound theological reflection on the generation of the Son from eternity, and then the Son’s generation as God-man, taking on flesh.
It is John’s prologue, without question. But does it reflect the point of view of Mary? Remember, she spent nine months of pregnancy fully aware of the divinity of the child she was carrying within her. We know that she was a contemplative soul who stored up deep reflections in her heart (Luke 2:19, 51). Did any of her reflections take a form similar to what we read in the Prologue?
Remember that where Matthew and Luke have infancy narratives, John has a prologue, and those infancy narratives originated with Mary. Let us simply say that that such a prologue would not be surprising as the expression of the insight of two contemplative souls, one of whom actually was the one in whom the Word became flesh.
Or consider the seven times in the Gospel of John where Jesus takes the name of God and reveals himself as “I AM”—for example, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (8:58). No such statements are found in the synoptic Gospels. Skeptical scholars used to argue that Jesus’ affirmation of himself as God in the Gospel of John alone shows that Gospel was composed very late, around A.D. 250, and that it was not even written by an apostle. (Scholars held this skeptical view, that is, until it was refuted by the discovery of a fragment of the Gospel of John dated to just after A.D. 100!)
But isn’t there a simpler, more human explanation for the difference in John’s that shows such skepticism is misplaced? We perceive and remember only what we are prepared to understand and take as noteworthy. Mary had complete faith in Jesus’ divinity, but the disciples were confused and bewildered. Wouldn’t it make sense that she would observe and “treasure in her heart” some things the disciples might not have even noticed?
Remember, this is the same woman who sang in her Magnificat, “Holy is his name!” (Luke 1:49). She even identifies herself as having particular zeal for the name of God. Note that the Gospel of John is distinctive also for telling the life of Christ from the point of view of Christ. This seems a characteristic viewpoint of a mother, to see and explain things from her child’s point of view.
The “feminine genius”
Another large-scale characteristic of the Gospel of John is that it consists of a string of conversations pieced together by a narrative frame. I first understood this clearly when I watched the (fairly good) 2003 movie, The Gospel of John, directed by Philip Saville. The late Christopher Plummer is the narrator. The movie’s script consists solely of the words of the Gospel. (Warning: it uses the Good News Bible, which is a paraphrase translation, even if the phrasing sounds natural. Also, without any support from Scripture or Tradition, the film places Mary Magdalene among the apostles at the Last Supper.)
But what I saw so plainly in the film is that John’s Gospel is a series of conversations, not deeds. But isn’t it reflective of the “feminine genius” to tell about someone by recounting his conversations? Take the Gospel of Mark in contrast: it consists almost entirely of miracles and exorcisms; Jesus does not even get around to teaching until the later chapters.
Women, of course, play a prominent role in John’s Gospel: Mary at Cana, the woman at the well, the mother and father of the man blind from birth, the anointing of the Lord, Mary and Martha, the women at the foot of the cross, Mary Magdalene in the garden.
But perhaps less appreciated is the prominence of ideas related to motherhood. Nicodemus raises the intriguing question: how is it possible for a man, when he’s old, to go back into his mother’s womb and be born again? Jesus likens his Passion to labor and childbirth (16:21). Jesus stands in the Temple and proclaims loudly (7:38) that everyone who believes in him will have rivers of living water flowing from his—? From what?
The Douay-Rheims has “out of his belly.” The RSVCE has “out of his heart.” But the Greek word is koilia, which standardly means, elsewhere in the New Testament, “the womb.” John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s koilia (Luke 1:41). “Blessed is the fruit of your koilia,” Elizabeth says. Nicodemus had asked how a grown man can go back into his mother’s koilia (3:4). It’s an unusual and striking image, but it seems motherly.
Drawing on tradition
A last large-scale characteristic which I’ll mention are the details of Our Lord’s compassion so evident in the Gospel of John. He weeps at the tomb of Larazus. He’s moved by the paralytic at the pool. He makes a poultice with his own spittle to apply to the eyes of the man born blind to be washed off in the pool of Siloam. Many commentators have emphasized that John’s Gospel is deeply personalistic. Isn’t such a quality also deeply maternal and feminine?
To bring out this quality, in my book I drew widely from John Henry Newman. One of the great joys in writing my commentary was interweaving as many choice comments from the tradition as possible. St. John Chrysostom has his Homilies on the Gospel of John, St. Augustine his great Tractates, and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a masterwork of a commentary. (Scholars like to say that you don’t know St. Thomas until you’ve studied his commentary on John.)
But John’s Gospel was the favorite Gospel of Newman, who quite possibly drew his own distinctive “personalism” from his reflections on John. In writing my book, I looked up every passage and homily in Newman which deals with verses from John, and I wove into my commentary Newman’s richest reflections.
I want to say that Newman’s dozens of comments on John, assembled as if into their own commentary, are themselves worth the price of the book. But I want to add that the appendix makes its own important contribution. David Bentley Hart recently produced a translation of the entire New Testament where he translates the Greek phrase usually rendered “everlasting life” (zoe aionios) as, instead, “life for the age.”
The reason is that Hart is a “universalist”—which means someone who holds that all are saved, no matter what they do in this life—and Jesus in Matthew 25:46 says that at the Last Judgment some will be consigned to everlasting life while others to everlasting punishment. This verse refutes universalism, and therefore Hart must insist, to protect his view, that “everlasting punishment” means only “punishment for the age”—that is, for the next age to come, and likewise “eternal life” means only life for the next age to come.
It’s a wacky view on its face, and it clearly requires that one distort Scripture. Yet Hart’s translation has sold many, many copies, and he has a lot of followers. However, I show conclusively in my book’s appendix, drawing on many passages in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament that the apostles used) that Hart’s view is wrong.
I wanted to conclude my book with this refutation, but my editor said to me, “It’s a book about Mary. Can you add something about Mary at the end, not David Bentley Hart?” So I looked and came upon a wonderful catechetical address by St. Pope John Paul II where, drawing upon many Church Fathers in support, he describes Mary as “the first creature to enter into eternal life.”
Why is this a good title for her? Because as Christians we believe in the resurrection of the body, and Mary, because of her Assumption, is the first person after Christ to enter body and soul into heaven. The eternal life won for us by Christ, this great pope, this “theologian of the body,” teaches is, after all, the life the soul and the body.
But Mary’s Assumption would have been around A.D. 60 or 65. John’s Gospel was probably written around A.D. 90. The tradition holds that the apostles all gathered together to be with Mary on her passing, and they witnessed the Assumption. Can we explain, then, John’s emphasis on “eternal life” as flowing from his actual experience of the beginning of the “eternal life” of his mother?
Does this hypothesis perhaps help to explain other characteristics of John’s Gospel? Does John, for example, tell of Lazarus at length because of how it foreshadows the eternal life of all of us, beginning with Mary? These are the questions with which I end the book. How fitting, I think, to end with such a beginning.
Sidebar: The Magnificat
We can view the Magnificat as something like the general framework for the Gospel of John. It should not be surprising that Mary composed, sang, and remembered the Magnificat. Holy persons do similar things all the time, composing prayers and hymns for their private devotion that they say for the remainder of their lives. David is credited with dozens of songs like that: we call them the Psalms.
One of the striking traits of the Magnificat is how it alternates in its attention between the mercy of God, which lifts up the lowly, and the power of God, which defeats the haughty: “he has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52-3); and so on. The chapters of John strikingly have a similar structure.
Episodes that display the mercy of Christ—notably, the paralytic by the pool (ch. 5), the man blind from birth (ch. 9), the raising of Lazarus (ch. 11)—are interwoven with episodes where haughty leaders who set themselves against Jesus seem blinded and are rendered powerless.