The Family of Jesus

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Abba, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Abba, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  Mark 3:20–21; 31–35 (NIV) Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” . . . Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” CONSIDER THIS These two passages from the Gospel of Mark clearly belong together and form bookends around material that will be taken up in the Day 8 entry. Since these two passages are strongly connected, then this means that the family described in the first one can now be identified with the mother and brothers of Jesus in the second one. Such a connection has been difficult to acknowledge for some interpreters because in each of these passages, Jesus’s own family, his flesh-and-blood relations, have trouble understanding just who he is. Though Jesus was still in the early phases of his ministry, he nevertheless challenged the authority of the Pharisees, religious leaders who called for the rigorous observance of the Jewish law as they were interpreting it. His family probably heard reports of this controversial activity, so when they learned in addition that Jesus and his disciples were so caught up in ministry they were not even able to eat, they decided to take action: “they went to take charge of him.” The Greek verb used here is strong and suggests decisive action on the part of his family. For example, when Mark employs this same verb elsewhere, in Mark 6:17, for example, it is translated into English as “arrest.” Why was the family of Jesus so concerned? The obvious answer, judging from the text, is that Jesus and his disciples were neglecting their basic bodily needs in not eating. However, this issue alone hardly seems sufficient to explain the strong-minded action on the part of his family. What else might be involved here? For one thing, first-century Israel was an honor-and-shame culture. Perhaps the members of his family feared many of the actions of Jesus, along with his increasing popularity, would eventually pose significant social problems for them with regard to their reputations, especially their networks of family, friends, and synagogue. Or perhaps they were concerned about Jesus leaving behind his stable occupation as a carpenter, passed along to him by Joseph, only to take up the drifting life of a wandering preacher. Who knows? At any rate, the subsequent charge that “He is out of his mind,” which forms the climax of the first passage, cannot be explained by an appeal to skipping a meal or two. Something else was going on here. It probably had to do with the person of Jesus, his basic identity, and how he had chosen to live his life. Already Jesus had given abundant evidence in his baptism and subsequent ministry that he was utterly dedicated to the worship of the Most High by proclaiming the kingdom of God: “‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’” (Mark 1:15). The entire family of Jesus likely shared this value as well, but perhaps not (at least at this point) in the same way that Jesus did. Such a difference in how a value is held may be a prescription for trouble or at least for misunderstanding. It is one thing to have a constellation of values; it is quite another thing to make the hard judgment calls that are involved in the process of ranking those many values (work, family, reputation, bodily needs, etc.) where one, and only one, emerges as preeminent. It appears from our passage that Jesus had placed such an emphasis on the worship of God, through the proclamation of the kingdom, that he, as well as his disciples, were willing to let go of other lesser needs for a while due to the considerable importance that Jesus attached to the glorification of God above all. The distance between the highest value of Jesus (worship of the Father, see John 6:38 and 14:31) and the next value in his ranking was far greater, much broader, than what would be entailed in the judgments of his family. Indeed, what the members of his family found so offensive, so much so that they claimed Jesus was “out of his mind,” was the unswerving focus, the energetic intensity, and the enthusiastic zeal of a man who was so utterly dedicated to God. But that’s Jesus. Our second passage reveals that Mary and the brothers of Jesus finally arrived, but notice that they did not enter the room where Jesus was. Instead, they sent someone else inside to call him. This person, whoever it was, did not speak directly to Jesus but to the crowd who surrounded him. Indeed, it was the crowd, likely made up of the disciples of Jesus, given what he subsequently said about them, who informed him: “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” The response of Jesus, in receiving this information, is surprising, for he asked: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” What could such a question possibly mean? Jesus quickly offered an answer in looking at those seated around him and exclaimed, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” Observe once again in this second passage, and in a way similar to the first, that Jesus gives evidence of a commitment to a preeminent value—to the worship of God above all else, and it holds priority over every other value, even over the strength of family relationships and blood ties. Later in Mark’s gospel, for example, Jesus will declare: “No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30). If we compare this passage with a similar one found in Matthew, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (10:37), we see once again the unwavering focus of Jesus on the will of God, which is now clearly identified with him—a focus that takes precedence over everything else, even over such things as family, clan, tribe, and nation. This teaching of Jesus was nothing less than revolutionary for first-century Israel on both a social and a religious level. In fact, it was perceived by some in that society as disruptive of the way things ought to be. It not only decentered family life, with its matter-of-fact blood relations, pointing it to something higher, but it also challenged a religious order that had grown presumptuous in thinking that family trees and proper ancestry necessarily guaranteed divine favor. Being a literal descendant of Abraham (if such lineage could even be proved in the first century) did not assure a privileged status in the sight of God. It, too, has now been decentered in the teaching of Jesus to make room for a larger and more embracing vision, one that will ultimately include Gentiles as well. Put another way, the consequences of doing the will of God, as Jesus so clearly affirmed, are far greater than both family ties as well as some of the mistaken judgments embedded in the religious order of the day. Such a teaching, then, would bring enormous hope to the masses. THE PRAYER God of Israel, in whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female—thank you for welcoming me into your family and claiming me as your own. May your kingdom come and your will be done in my heart, home, church, and community, and any other allegiance be rightly ordered around your loving reign.