Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Families are a big focus of our culture today. Most people grow up in a family. Many people desire to get married and raise a family. And strong families are thought by some to be the backbone of a stable society—teaching us social and ethical values and training us to be good citizens. I find myself valuing my own family for the way that it had formed me and for the ties of love and mutual concern that continue to exist and shape my life.
In the gospel passage for today Jesus tells the disciples that his mother and brothers are standing outside. Jesus responds by saying that the people gathered there are his real mother and brothers. What this is telling us is not immediately clear. Is Jesus saying that we should neglect our families? Doesn’t he think that families are important? If his family were in trouble wouldn’t he help them? Shouldn’t he favor the needs of his family over those of strangers?
It seems to me that Jesus is drawing attention to the difference between our natural families and the family of believers. The upshot of what he says is that when we are baptized, we are baptized into a new family—namely the Church. The Church is a family that is united by love. More specifically, the people in this family (i.e. Christians) are united by their love for God and their willingness to do God’s will. In both Jesus’ time and our own, families were considered very important. (In Jesus’ time and culture family and family times were perhaps even more important to people living in that culture than they are to us today). So insofar as Jesus’ words seem to be minimizing the importance of families, they are indeed very radical both for his time and for ours.
Despite the seemingly radical stance on families that Jesus presents, however, he is not denigrating families as unimportant or unworthy. He is placing in question the proper role for families in our lives as Christians. Many religious—among them many priests, nuns, brothers, and permanent deacons—have given up the right to have a natural family by becoming sworn celibates. This is indeed one way to follow God’s will. Yet this is not the only to be faithful to Jesus’ teaching in the gospel passage for today. Some laypeople are called to the vocation of marriage. Other laypeople remained unmarried. Regardless of our vocation, what we need to do to be faithful to Jesus words here is to do God’s will. Jesus stated elsewhere that the greatest commandment was to love God above all things (Matthew 22: 37-8). If there are things in our lives that are getting in the way of that – whether they are family or something else – then we are not doing what Jesus commands.
One concrete conclusion of the gospel reading is that families should not be allowed to become an idol for us. Furthermore, we are called to reach out beyond our natural families to those on the outside so that our social interactions do not become insular and self-absorbed. This means reaching out not only to others in our circle of friends, colleagues, and immediate family but also to those who on the surface seem to have less in common with us but who, like us, are members of the family of Christian believers. By developing hospitality, we follow Jesus’ command to do God’s will and to see other Christians as our brothers and sisters.
Joel Schickel