GOSPEL REFLCTION, MONDAY, 10TH WEEK OF ORDINARY TIME, 9 JUNE 2025, BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, MOTHER OF THE CHURCH, MEMORIAL

John 19:25-27.  The death of any loved one can be an exceedingly difficult time for the survivors.  It is much more difficult if that death occurs as a criminal execution in the midst of political and religious turmoil, as Jesus’ death was.  It was a dangerous time, so most of the disciples had fled in fear, one betrayed him (Peter) as Jesus had already predicted, and another (Judas) had just sold him for thirty pieces of silver.  Yet five people close to Jesus stood by at the foot of the cross, his mother Mary, his mother’s sister (Salome), Mary wife of Cleopas (she was another relative), Mary Magdalene, and John the Evangelist.  We owe these five so much because they were direct witnesses of the end of Jesus’ earthly life and must have contributed much knowledge of what happened there to the living gospel within the early Church, and eventually to the written gospels.  These five people who witnessed Jesus’ death were in a real sense the core of what became the Church along with the disciples who first had fled but now had returned having witnessed Jesus’ resurrection.  There we have it – the Paschal Mystery is the core of our Christian faith.  As the five people stood at the foot of the cross, Jesus was not desolate, despite the fact that a number of his kinsmen had rejected his public ministry (see John ch. 7).  Seeing his mother there, Jesus committed her to the care of John  the Evangelist and committed John to the care of his mother.  Some early tradition states that John took Mary with him when he went to Ephesus where she lived with him the rest of her days.  What we as present-day disciples witness here is love, of Jesus for his mother and John (the disciple Jesus loved), and for the other women disciples that stood there during that tragic and violent moment, in other words the core of what was to become the Church.  Love and fidelity go together, and both are essential ingredients in our faith.