Mark 3:31-35 (NIV): Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”
“Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.
Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
Some people think that Jesus is being cruel in His statement here, perhaps even disowning His own mother and brothers in favor of those who were following Him and learning from Him. But the reality is deeper than that.
Jesus, as usual, was talking in terms of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God has always been composed of those who have completely committed themselves to God. No one gets to be a member of God’s kingdom by being a family member of someone in the kingdom, or by joining a certain church, giving a certain amount of money, or adopting a certain set of beliefs. The only way to enter God’s kingdom is through faith in Jesus, through being born again in Him. At this point in His ministry, Jesus had quite a few people, both men and women, who had left all, jobs, families, property, to become one of His followers. They had staked all that they had, all that they were, on who they knew Jesus to be. They were becoming active members of God’s kingdom as it was being instated through Jesus ministry.
As members of God’s kingdom, they were already being built into one people, united around the same Messiah, the same priorities, the same over-arching worldview. And, as such, they began to have much more in common with those who were also in the kingdom than they did with those who were merely related to them by blood. (Some say that blood is thicker than water, but the water of life is thicker than blood!) This is the reality to which Jesus was pointing. Those who had joined Him in the here-and-now reality of God’s kingdom were His real family, the ones he had the most in common with, the ones to whom he could easily speak about the things that were most important. They had become His brothers, His sisters, His mother.
When Jesus was pointing out this powerful relational aspect of God’s kingdom, He was not excluding His earthly family members. The door was open wide to them, too. And, thankfully, many of His earthly family did become members of the kingdom through faith in Him. For some, like His earthly brothers, it took His rising form the dead to overcome the contempt of Him that was based on their familiarity (cf. John 7:3-5), the same contempt expressed by the people of His hometown (Mark 6:2-3).
Those who have become members of God’s kingdom can easily relate to Jesus’ insight. The others who have trusted in Jesus for their own salvation, who have walked the same path from sin through the cross to salvation, often become closer than blood family. And that experience underscores the real unity that is ours as we live together and work together, laugh together and cry together, suffer together and rejoice together, as members of the family of God.
Father, this is a glorious reality that has been underscored many times in my own life. Thank You for bringing together all of Your people as one community, one body, one family. Amen.