This Week: Proper 5B
Gospel: Mark 3:20-35
Our approach to the gospel this week really depends on our sense of family—and how comfortable we are with conflict.
Some are going: those are synonyms.
Others think: these don’t go together at all!
And perhaps there is no greater example of the challenge than that.
The trouble with talking about family
It boils down to whether or not you have a good one. A good family of origin, family of present, chosen family, or community. Or a good relationship within your present, familiar family.
And it is so common to not have this, that people who do have this can be incredibly insensitive with our talk of family, being together, or wanting to keep a good relationship with parents, children, or extended networks.
And further, there are people who come from terrible families who are making good families of their own now. People who know what it is like to have both.
But more than anything, the word family does not only carry positive associations. And often, when we pretend it does, that is when we are less likely to be understood!
That’s the starting place. But, of course, there is more. We have extended families, families of origin, children, parents, aunts and uncles, chosen family, associations and neighborhoods, common experience with others, and the myriad ways of connecting with others that we end up labeling “family”.
But here’s the foundational piece we have to deal with in the text and with any conversation about families:
Which family exactly?
For many of us, we exist with two senses of family that relate to our own sense of identity: as child and as independent person. We are someone’s child, so we exist in that family. We also construct our own families with spouses and potential children and all of that. Two senses of the proverbial nuclear family. Simultaneous. Everlasting.
And this need to see this, not as two parts of a patchwork quilt of our lives, but as a solvable equation with a singular answer is a modern fixation. The nuclear family is, of course, a product of the 20th century and exists as a strange creation of modern society. A creation that seems oblivious to the simple idea that we have valuable connections outside the home.
This vision of a singular, nuclear family, in which children are sent away from one family to create their own, has morphed into silos of independence half a continent away from support systems. It is breeding distance and dysfunction in ways we aren’t willing to admit.
But this, ultimately, is what we mean by family, isn’t it?
Family is me and my spouse, two kids, and two cats living under this one roof. That’s it.
So, to the modern reader, how is Jesus wrong when he tells his mother that his real family isn’t her and his siblings? He’s off an on his own. His family is himself, really.
Isn’t that really what we think?
It’s not? Huh… Well then maybe it’s more complicated than we think.
The central theme isn’t American.
That should go without saying, but it really does seem to need to be said.
The sense of family Jesus is speaking to isn’t American. Or Western. He isn’t speaking to ways of being that resonate with our experience any more than with British, German, Roman, or Greek.
Jesus is describing a sense of family that transcends our family of origin to be about something beyond blood. That there is a connection higher than that of our natal origin.
There’s a delightful irony that we recently had that reading about Nicodemus and getting his mind focused on the birthing process. It isn’t just a literal response to Jesus—it is akin (of the same family!) to the way we respond to our own family connections. We put more stock in whose DNA we’re constructed from than whose neighbor we are. Who we befriend and love and mourn and celebrate.
There is something genuinely difficult about saying that Jesus wants our first family to be our kinship with God. That it really does need to be more important “than family” when we define it by birth and law.
There’s something insulting to our minds when we say we love God more than any one person. But that is the commitment we make.
And that, more than our definition of family, that speaks volumes. That we don’t just struggle to understand Jesus’s mindset, but to ultimately honor it. That we really do place all of this below something greater than ourselves.
And that something isn’t just God. It is God’s project of kinship, familiarity, community, and yes, divine family. That we might be more of a family in our relationship in Christ than in any other way and in relationship to any other person.
Including our mother, child, or spouse.
That this family, in the family of God as children of God, is the one family that really is more important than anything else.