Please read the passage before the homily.
Catholics celebrate the fifteenth of September as a commemoration of the sorrowS of Mary, especially after death of Jesus on the cross. September 15 follows the fourteenth, which has for many years celebrated the cross on which Jesus died..
This passage puts Mary at the Cross of Jesus with two other women named Mary. The disciple “whom Jesus loved” was also there, presumedly a man because Jesus referred to this disciple as male.
John puts these words on the lips of the dying Jesus. In them, Jesus was announcing his last will and testament. As the only son of a widowed mother, Jesus had the responsibility of proving for his mother in her later years. Jesus considered the disciple as appropriate and capable of performing this task.
Jesus, however, goes further and proclaims the disciple as son of Jesus’ mother. This takes us back to Genesis where God fashions the women from the sleeping side of the Adam, an action which serves to propagate the human race. From the sleeping side of Christ on the cross, God will fashion the Church, a feminine figured in the gendered languages of the world of that time. The beloved disciple becomes with Mary a figure of the new being, the Church which is the disciple whom Jesus loves.
The death of Jesus is a cause for sorrow for the mother, but the sorrow is from what turns out to be the birth pangs of the Church which springs forth from the sleeping side of Christ. Just as God formed Eve from the sleeping side of Adam, so did God form the Church from the side of Christ dead on the cross.
The Cross, the sight of the death of Jesus, becomes the birthplace of the Church. Here the Mothe of Jesus undertakes being the Mother of All Believers as she and the disciples whom Jesus loved enter in a new relationship. We celebrate sorrow, but never exclude joy.