“Family” can mean many things to different people. For many of us, family is a source of security and acceptance, love, belonging, support, and challenge. For others of us, family can mean unacceptance, rejection, abandonment, abuse, exclusion and pain. Despite the associations that we have with “family,” it seems clear that there is a sense of the “familiar” here. We all have somewhat of a patterned notion of what family is, i.e, what we have become accustomed to expect. This is the “familiar” that engenders comfortableness or at least some high degree of expectations in terms of outcomes in circumstances. We are convinced that certain things (attitudes, perceptions, etc.) will “play out” on the stage of familiarity, based upon a history. Inasmuch as these patterns of familiarity can be life-giving, they can unfortunately just as easily be destructive and death-dealing.
Today’s Gospel (MT 12: 46-50) sets up an interesting stage regarding what is familiar and what may be unfamiliar to us. Jesus is engaged with the “crowd,” some people he may know and perhaps many that he did not know. While addressing the crowd, Jesus’ family shows up and they want to speak with him. Someone informs Jesus of this and He, instead of leaving the crowd to go and talk to his family, seems to want to use the moment to invite a perhaps surprising consideration. From the standpoint of the “family,” this could very well have been taken as disrespect and disregard (somewhat reminiscent of the child Jesus found in the temple area speaking with the elders, while his parents were desperately searching for him). How could Jesus not stop what he is doing and go speak with these who know him so well – his family?
Jesus is staying with the “crowd” – this group of people who may be very diverse in their lifestyles, understanding of life, morality, religion, politics, etc. I wonder what the crowd was thinking when Jesus, not only does not “go out” to see his family, but instead asks them “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers (and sisters)?” And then, He STRETCHES his hand out towards the crowd and says, “Here are my mothers and my brothers (and sisters).”
I don’t feel that Jesus is trying to undermine his relationship to his mother and family at all. But, I do find it interesting that the Gospel says that “his mother and his brothers appeared outside.” That which is most apparently “familiar” to Jesus is in this scene, now on the “outside” of what is really going on. Could this be a challenge, not to turn our backs on our families, but perhaps to look deeper into the possible dangerous effects that familiarity can have upon us? We have all seen and experienced over the last few weeks in an agonizing way how “familiar” patterns of thinking can erupt into senseless violence and devastating outcomes.
The prophet Micah (MIC 7: 14-15, 18-20), in the first reading today, describes how our own GOD responds to this…
Who is there like you, the God who removes guilt and pardons sin for the remnant of his inheritance; Who does not persist in anger forever, but delights rather in clemency, And will again have compassion on us, treading underfoot our guilt? You will cast into the depths of the sea all our sins;
What would it take for us to “stay with the crowd,” in a way that opens us up to the possibility that there is an unseen, yet to be found, new way of compassionately looking at each other? A way that can transform patterns of familiarity (as Micah points out… guilt, anger, “all our sins”) that seem to give us security but only serve to prevent relationships that can engender and grow FAMILY!
Our “familiarities” can many times place others and ultimately ourselves on the “outside” of Life itself! There is a newness that can come from “stretching out” towards something or someone who may have always “appeared” to be or was placed on the “outside” and for that reason, seemed a threat in some way. This is the outreach of embrace not violence. And it is an honest and responsible gesture that does not deny pain and suffering that has resulted from mistaking “familiarity” for Family, but can indeed begin to heal even before the pain subsides!
The Gospel today closes with…
For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.”
Perhaps God’s will is simply our willingness to begin to see, appreciate and enliven through heart-ful action the yet untapped relationship that we all have with one another. We could begin to look like what we are hiding from ourselves – A Holy Family!
Peace
Thomas