Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 450

"My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it."

People who worry about the future of marriage and family may be startled to hear today's gospel story about Jesus' relation to his own family. Clearly, he is not totally available to them. The story is told three times in the three synoptic gospels; scholars tell us the evangelists each have a slightly different take on it.

• Saint Mark emphasizes Jesus' isolation. Everyone abandoned him, including the Roman authorities, the Jewish civil and religious authorities, Jewish partisans (zealots and Pharisees), his disciples and his family. Even God is tragically absent as Jesus' last cry for help goes unanswered. In that context it is no surprize that Jesus pays little attention to the arrival of his family; their intentions are hostile. 
• Saint Matthew is especially concerned with the developing Church of his time, as it met new and unfamiliar challenges. One of them may have been the family of Jesus who expected special recognition in the community. If that is the case, then Jesus' statement simply dismisses those connections. Being kin to the Son of David means nothing; only faithful disciples have standing in the Church. 
• Saint Luke shows more sympathy for the family of Jesus, especially for his mother. She appears at the beginning of both of his works, the Gospel and Acts. Luke doesn't accentuate Jesus' abandonment. In fact, there were sympathetic people, especially Simon of Cyrene who carried his cross; and the "women of Jerusalem" who wept for him, and stood at a distance wailing as he died. So in today's Lukan account, Jesus does not dismiss his mother and his family; he simply includes them among his disciples. 

With all that said, this story with its three renderings reminds us that the "family" of the Church is based not on blood ties but on faith. We may call one another brothers and sisters; we may refer to authorities as father and mother; but the Holy Spirit, and not blood ties, binds us together. In fact the local church that relies too heavily on kinship or nationality may lose its Christian identity. 
True disciples of Jesus orient all their relationships around him. Sometimes families are so hostile to the Church that the baptized must abandon their family. More often, husbands and wives realize that their relationship begins in their life of prayer. Not sexual desire, shared interests, compatibility, social expectation, financial dependence or their co-responsibility as parents can hold them together. Without the grace of discipleship there is no Sacrament of Marriage; this has become painfully obvious in our day.  
Discipleship in Jesus never opposes marriage or family but it gives these institutions a solid foundation in generous self-sacrifice. Husbands, wives and children who serve the Lord neither worship one another nor expect adulation from each other. The child realizes her parents are not "for me all the time" or "all about me." The parent does not hover over a child like a helicopter, desperate for the child's success and achievement. 
The Christian family, in the words of today's psalm, is "built as a city with compact unity"; they call to one another, "Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord."