Mark 3:20-35
Every time I have explored this Gospel passage in a Bible study with others, someone has made the honest observation that we don’t much like this part. Jesus seems angry, and impatient, and he is apparently very willing to abandon and disown his mother and siblings. He gives his detractors mysterious and complicated parables to puzzle through, and he warns them of the dangers of putting themselves in the place of God. Then he hears that his family is outside looking for him, and instead of going to them, he turns back toward the crowd surrounding him and chooses to remain in their midst.
As someone who feels a great affection for the mother of our Lord, I struggle with Jesus’s words but also with Mary’s actions. Mary has come with her other children to try to restrain Jesus, to stop him from speaking publicly. They believe him to be out of his mind because of what he is teaching and how he is healing people. His siblings I can understand, but what about Mary? Is this not the same woman who received an angelic announcement about a child who will be miraculously conceived and change the world forever? Does Mary no longer remember when Elizabeth greeted her as the mother of the Lord? Has she forgotten the words of Zechariah, who recognized Jesus as the Messiah a mere 40 days after his birth? And what about the wise ones who presented him with gifts worthy of royalty? It is hard to read the Magnificat, the song of Mary, and think Mary ignorant of her son’s future. If the Biblical witness is to be believed, Mary has always known her son was different, even before he was conceived. Jesus was never destined for a long and ordinary life. Mary was warned that a sword would pierce her soul, and that her son would be the cause of the rising and falling of many. When Mary heard the rumors that Jesus was arguing with the powerful and prioritizing the outcast and the sinners, I have a hard time imagining her as surprised by any of it.
So why would someone who has more forewarning than anyone other than Jesus himself about the trajectory of the Son of God’s life choose to attempt an intervention? If we forget Mary’s humanity, it seems incomprehensible. But Mary is human, and she is a mother. As a woman of faith, as someone who sang a prophetic song about lifting up the lowly and casting the mighty from their thrones, she might agree with all of what Jesus is saying and doing. But as a mother, she must have lain awake at night praying for her firstborn’s safety. As a mother she must have wept for the wedding that would never happen, the grandchildren that would never be, long before she followed her son to his cross. The future full of life and love and peace that every parent wishes for their child was fading away in front of Mary’s eyes as her son pushed further and further beyond the bounds of polite Jewish society under oppressive Imperial rule. I have not yet had the privilege of parenthood, but I can imagine the grief of letting go can be overpowering. So I cannot fault Mary for wishing she could hold on a little longer, hoping against hope that she could delay the inevitable change if she could just get her arms around her baby boy before someone else came for him. I understand why a mother would try to restrain her son from doing something dangerous.
But in doing so, Mary in her humanity is forgetting who Jesus is. She is denying him his right to be fully himself, to live according to his inner compass and love in the way he was made to. In trying to restrain Jesus, Mary is asking him to be less than who he is, to deny himself for the sake of his family’s comfort. Jesus’s mother and siblings are so afraid of losing him that in trying to prevent it, they risk destroying the very relationship they are trying to save. They are choosing their own will for Jesus’s life over the will of God, and for that Jesus rebukes them.
It is painful, imagining Mary and her other children standing outside of the crowded house, desperately trying to get inside to Jesus before he says something he cannot take back. A crowd of strangers stands between Mary and her son, and her son chooses to stay inside with the strangers. Not only does Jesus choose to stay inside, but he looks around and names the people around him as his family, his mother and brothers and sisters. He says no to the well-meaning pleas of his family of origin, and instead claims a newfound family of outcasts and sinners, the disabled and the demon-plagued, people who share neither his blood nor his family name. The rejection stings, even all these years later.
But reconciliation and redemption are always available when it comes to Jesus. And we know that Jesus was reunited with his family of origin sometime between this scene and his death, because his mother was with him at the cross and his brother went on to be a leader and a martyr of the early Christian church. So the rebuke, as painful as it is, is not a permanent rejection. Jesus does not say “They are not my family.” Jesus says “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” He redefines and expands the definition of family to mean something more than birth and names and social contracts. He extends an open invitation to all who hear it that the family of God is a big one, and the threshold to entry is deceptively simple. Doing the will of God, living out the commandments to love God and neighbor as he will teach his disciples, building the kingdom community he inaugurated through his ministry. These are the characteristics that define the family of God. This is what makes it possible for us to be members of Jesus’s family just as much as his mother or his siblings.
The invitation to become part of Jesus’s new family is extended to everyone, and that includes Mary and her other children. Their love for him first made it hard for them to see all of him, to support and accept the parts of him that scared and awed and challenged them. But ultimately their love for him overcame all else, and by knowing him fully and celebrating every part of him, they became reconciled to God through him and took their places as prophets and leaders, members of Jesus’s family in a new way. In them we have a model of what it means to repent and return to the Lord, because they did it first. It took time, and correction from Jesus, and probably a lot of grieving and wrestling with a new worldview, but Mary and Jesus’s brothers and sisters came to a new understanding, and rather than standing proud in their old ways, they embraced Jesus for all that he was. They began as his family by default, but ultimately they chose to be part of the new family he found and made along the way. In the process, they became closer to God and free to be more fully who God was calling them to be. May we all follow their example.
Mother A Writes 