20 May 2024 John 19:25-34 Dr. David C. Campbell
“Behold your mother.” John 19:27
One of the ironies of social media is that while it says it promotes communication and connection, it has wound up making people so profoundly lonely that the Surgeon General has had to issue a report on the “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” (2023). It states that, among other things, we have to re-evaluate our relationship to the digital world which at present “detracts from meaningful and healing connection with others.” It calls on communities to “design environments that promote connection…and invest in institutions that bring people together.”
Many are discovering (or rediscovering) that the Church has been doing this from the beginning on a level more profound by far than any envisioned by the Surgeon General.
The core of the community formed by Jesus was His family. John the Baptist was his cousin. His mother Mary invited her sister-in-law also named Mary and her husband Cleopas, who was the brother of Mary’s husband Joseph, and they were with the Twelve in all Jesus’ travels. Their children Simon, Jude, and James were part of the Twelve, and James later became the leader of the first church in Jerusalem. This core of people stayed with Jesus all the way to Calvary – the two Marys carefully noted the place of Jesus’ burial so that they could bring spices to anoint him with the day after Good Friday. Cleopas and James were among the first to be visited by the Risen Christ.
All the others were added to this core, making them kind of an extended family. Jesus Himself made this official when He said from the cross to John, “Behold your mother” (John 19:27), and John did. He treated her like his mother every day after that. They all did, and the extended family got bigger and bigger. It is growing still, over 2.5 billion worldwide.
And that wasn’t all. John later wrote that the relationship that all believers have in Jesus connects us all together to the very inner life of God: “I pray…that they may all be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in you, that they also may be in Us” (17:21). So Christians never wonder what the meaning of life is, or what our purpose in the world is, or where this life is going. We know. The bond we have with each other is the same bond God has with the world: “For God so loved the world…” (John 3:16). That is our joy, that is our peace, that is our home, that is our mission.
There is an institution that is already very good at bringing people together, creating bonds that help, heal and hope. The Church is what the Surgeon General is looking for.
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