John’s attention to the events immediately following Jesus’s demise transforms a death scene into a birth. The piercing of Christ’s side, unique to this Gospel, brings forth a flood of blood and water. John has just hinted at the fruit of that birth: the fledgling church standing at the foot of the cross (John 19:25–27). Two of that group—his mother and Mary Magdalene—flank the body of the dead Christ in this painting of The Lamentation of Christ, attributed to the Master of the Straus Madonna. But it is the figure at the centre of the panel who is the true mother.

It was common in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to display the symbols of Christ’s Passion—the so-called arma Christi or ‘weapons of Christ’—synchronously for contemplation. This makes for a busy scene, though not enough to detract from the central image of the Man of Sorrows. The flow of blood is collected in a chalice, a reminder of Jesus’s earlier words that ‘he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day’ (John 6:54b). The bread and wine of the Eucharist make that divine life accessible to the believer in the present.

Underscoring John’s portrayal of the dead Christ as a life-giving mother, a female pelican is depicted in a central position above Christ’s wounded head. A familiar image of Christ, it reflects the ancient belief that a pelican would wound herself, pecking her breast in order to feed her young rather than see them die. In this death which is also a birth, Christ our Mother has given his life that the children may live.

References

Fehribach, Adeline. 2003. ‘The ‘Birthing’ Bridegroom: The Portrayal of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel,’ in A Feminist Companion to John, vol. 2, ed. by Amy-Jill Levine with Marianne Blickenstaff (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), pp.104–29