Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
The text from Luke today puts forward an incredible possibility—that we might become like a mother or brother to Jesus. How can this be? How could we get anything like that close to Jesus?
Making this possibility all the more vivid is the fact that when Jesus speaks his real mother and brothers—Mary herself and his brothers—are at the scene. Their proximity makes Jesus’s reference to the possibility that we might be his kin seem all the more real. He means it when he says that those who are not his blood relations can become his kin, his family.
But how?
Jesus says that we must do two things: hear the word and do it.
I often feel like the biggest obstacle to doing the word is, in fact, hearing it.
Hearing the word today is hard. That’s partly because the word has to compete with so many loud voices in our culture telling us that our chief aim in life should not be to serve but to get as much as we can, that we should not be humble but instead sell ourselves at every opportunity, that rather than make peace we should identify our enemies and eliminate them as quickly possible, and so forth. Even worse, some of the loudest voices insist that they are proclaiming the word! With all that noise and confusion, it’s no wonder that we may find ourselves struggling even to know what the word is—never mind do it.
Saint Augustine knew something about this problem. There were plenty of loud and conflicting voices about the word in his day too. In his On Christian Doctrine, he offers a simple solution to the problem of hearing the true word. He says that, in the end, the word of God always says the same thing: love your neighbor as yourself and love even your enemy. So, he says, if the word you’re hearing conflicts in any way with that word then you’re not hearing the word.
And if you are hearing the word than the question of what to do is simple: love. And you will be Jesus’ kin.
- Sue Trollinger