A Reflection by:
Fr Joshan Rodrigues,
St Francis Xavier Church, Dabul, Mumbai.
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Every so often a crisis can arise in a family relating to some family member, and other family members often feel the need to intervene. It can be difficult to know whether or not it is a good thing to intervene. Will it make matters better or worse? If a decision is made to intervene, there arises the question as to how best to do so. Such interventions are not always well received by the family member in question, even if they are done out of love and concern, which is generally the underlying motivation.
We find a somewhat similar situation in the family of Jesus in today’s gospel reading. Since he left his home in Nazareth, Jesus has literally been a man with a mission. The son of the carpenter has become the proclaimer of the presence of God’s kingdom. His message was experienced as good news by many, especially the most vulnerable and broken. However, the same message was perceived as dangerous and troublesome by others, especially those who prided themselves on understanding God’s will as expressed in the Jewish Law. Jesus has been making many enemies among the influential and the powerful. So much so, that many people have been saying about Jesus, ‘he is out of his mind’. Jesus’ family feel the need to do something out of concern for his well-being.
The beginning of today’s gospel reading says that his relatives set out from Nazareth to take charge of Jesus. It sounded as if they were going to forcibly take him home. The end of today’s gospel reading shows what happened when they reached the house in Capernaum where Jesus was teaching with a group of his followers sitting around him, listening to him. When Jesus was informed that his family, including his mother, were outside asking for him to come out, he looked around at those seated about him and said in effect, ‘this is now my family’. ‘Here are my mother and brothers’ and sisters. Everyone who seeks to do God’s will as Jesus reveals it is now a member of his new family.
Here was a family intervention that did not quite go according to plan from the perspective of Jesus’ family members. God was at work in the life of Jesus in a way that his family did not understand and struggled to accept. Their plans and purposes for Jesus were too small. They had yet to learn to surrender to God’s purpose for Jesus’ life. Sometimes, our plans and purposes for others, even for those we love the best, can be too confining. We often struggle to let them go to a greater purpose that we don’t fully understand at the time. God’s purpose for Jesus was that he would form a new family, a family of his disciples. In time, this new family came to be called the church.
We are all members of that new family of Jesus. God’s purpose for Jesus’ life has come to embrace us all. All who have been baptized in the name of the Trinity belong to the family of the church. The words of Jesus at the end of today’s gospel reading are very striking. He is saying in effect that the members of his family of origin do not have a stronger claim on him in virtue of their blood relationship with him. He clearly wants the members of his family of origin to become members of his new family, but, in doing so they are no more his brothers and sisters and mother than the other members of his new family. Jesus’ words bring home to us the privileged relationship we have with him. Through the Holy Spirit, we have become his brothers and sisters. Although Jesus is the Son of God in a unique way, we have been caught up into his own relationship with God; we are sons and daughters of God.
This great privilege contains its own calling. When Jesus looked around at his new family at the end of today’s gospel reading, he said, ‘anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother and sister and mother’. Sometimes the call to do the will of God, as Jesus has revealed it to us, does not always come easy to us. The first reading refers to Adam who did his own will rather than God’s will, eating from the tree that God had forbidden to him, in an effort to be like God. As a result of not doing God’s will, he felt distant from God and hid from God; so God had to cry out after him, ‘Where are you?’
In the gospel reading, the learned scribes were clearly acting contrary to God’s will in attributing Jesus’ healing power to an evil spirit, Satan, rather than to God’s Spirit. Jesus declares that those who demonize goodness in this way put themselves beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness. The demonizing of those who proclaim God’s will to the world, and live accordingly, has been with us all through history, up to the present. As members of Jesus’ family, Jesus taught us to pray, ‘Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’. Our daily calling as the Lord’s brothers and sisters is to make that prayer a reality in the concrete circumstances of our lives, by doing the will of God as he has revealed it to us.

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