Chapter 6 - To the family of Jesus all God's children may belong

In the family

 I love The Salvation Army.  I grew up in it, it was like my extended family from birth to adulthood.  But what I have found about The Salvation Army is that you very often bump into people outside of it who know someone who is or has been in it.  They say that you’re never more than six feet away from a rat.  It seems that you’re never very far away from a Salvationist, ex-Salvationist, or someone who knows one.

 What I’ve also found is that a large proportion of Salvationists marry other Salvationists.  And so we have a situation where lots of Salvationists know lots of other Salvationists.  It’s a small world in The Salvation Army, and an even smaller gene pool, I like to say.

 So, joking aside, The Salvation Army is – or at least, can be, at its best – one big happy family.  And you might be surprised at who is related to whom, and how, within the family.

 Families can surprise us, by their size, their complexity, and their members.  Have you ever found yourself amazed that two particular people are related?  Have you ever seen one of those documentaries, such as “Fifteen kids and counting”?  If we think that’s a lot, let’s think about rats again for a moment.  A rat can have up to ten or twelve babies in a litter.  And then, a few months later, maybe, they can do it all again.  The greeting cards industry would be much more lucrative in the animal kingdom, I imagine.

A day in the life…

 In Mark chapter 3, we see a day in the life of Jesus.  First of all, this might be the Sabbath, and Jesus may have just healed on the Sabbath – in the synagogue, no less… So a bit of early drama.  Then, maybe the same day, maybe not, he goes off to the lake with the disciples – that’ll be lake Galilee – and he’s followed by huge crowds from Galilee – and beyond, actually.  They come because they’ve heard about what he’s been doing, the healings and so on.  They want to press right in against him, so they can touch him and be healed, whether it’s blindness, demon-possession, or whatever ailment it may be, they all want a piece of Jesus.  These people are limping through life, for some reason or other, and they want to be whole, free, well…

 So Jesus manages to get away from the crowd for a bit, and goes up a mountainside, and he calls out the names of the twelve men he chooses and appoints as his disciples – his students – and apostles – those he will send… We’ll come back to these guys later.

 Then Jesus goes home.  And still he doesn’t get a minute, because the crowd comes together again, “so that they could not even eat…”  No time or room to even eat.  That’s busy.  And so Jesus’ family, hearing about this, go to try and stop this, because people are saying he’s nuts, or as other versions suggest, the family themselves were saying he’s nuts…

 And then we come to the scribes.  These guys are often seen as like pantomime villains in the gospels.  That might be a bit unfair, because they think they’re doing the right thing.  They’re called scribes because they made copies of the scriptures, they wrote them out.  They loved the Hebrew bible, they learned it, they wrote it, they wanted to make sure that others could learn it and live by it like they did.  They’re kind of like police, because, like the Pharisees, they want to make sure that people obey the Law.  But they’re not like the police, in that they didn’t have any real power.

 So they crash this party, to check what’s going on.  And when they see Jesus casting out demons, they conclude that he’s doing this by a demon.  And Jesus pulls them up on this.

 In an earlier chapter, we thought about assumptions.  Well, here the scribes are making assumptions.  They are so arrogant, so presumptuous, that they think the Holy Spirit must be an unclean spirit, because He’s not doing what they expect.  ‘How can this be a God thing?’ they say, ‘because God didn’t tell us He was going to do this…’  And Jesus lets them know that they’re not as close to God as they might think…

All God’s children

 And this is brilliantly juxtaposed with the little bit about the family.  When Jesus’ mother and brothers try to get in the house to see Jesus, someone passes the message to Jesus: “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you”.  And Jesus says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And he looks at the people around him, and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother…”

 Who are they?  Well, who’s in the crowd?  First of all, this is the same crowd, or a similar one, as the one from earlier: the sick, the poor, the broken, the excluded, among others.

 So Jesus looks at this crowd and says these guys are my mother and brothers and sisters…

 I used to think this was really harsh on Jesus’ mother and siblings.  How can he say that these people, and not his own relatives, are his family?  But that’s just it – he doesn’t.  At no point here does Jesus actually disown his family.  He doesn’t say, “They’re not my family, these are!”  He just says, “These are my family…”  Although Jesus maybe does have cause to fall out with his family, if they did call him nuts – he doesn’t.  He’s not having a cheap shot to get back at them.

 I think what he’s doing is telling a kind of parable.  He’s using an illustration.  Someone has said to him, Jesus, you’re family are outside.  And Jesus says, wait: my family is here.  You’re all my family.  They are too, but for me, family goes far beyond flesh and blood, or law.  He’s not excluding anyone, but he’s including everyone… As John Gowans has put it in one of my favourite songs, “To the family of Jesus, all God’s children may belong”…

 Jesus looks at that crowd, and he says, ‘You’re all God’s children.  That makes us family…’ That’s an interesting idea.  That the poor and sick and broken, the lost, already are God’s children.  So maybe it’s not just when people decide to follow Jesus that they become God’s children…

Will

 But some will point out, rightly, that Jesus adds the qualification: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother…”  They may also note that Matthew’s account of this story has Jesus referring specifically to his disciples, not just the crowds…  To be part of Jesus’ family means doing the will of God.

 So what’s that?  What does that look like?  For the scribes, this meant following the hundreds of rules laid out in the Law.  And we could tie ourselves in knots trying to work out God’s will.  But maybe this will help:  Micah 6 verse 8 says, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

 In a nutshell, you could say that’s God’s will.  That’s what he wants from people.  Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.  Briefly, let’s explore that.  Justice, that’s about doing the right thing, being fair, honest and so on, in all our dealings.  To love kindness means to love being kind, to commit to being kind and generous to people in the same way we commit to anything or anyone we love.  And to walk humbly with God… that’s the thing.  That’s what it’s really about.

 To walk humbly with God means, first of all, we walk with God: we follow Him, we live with Him and for Him.  But to do this humbly means we recognise who he is and who we are.  We recognise that He is God, the Creator, Preserver and Governor of all things.  And we’re not.  We’re sinful, we don’t have a leg to stand on before Him – but He invites us to come anyway.  Come as we are.

 Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens…”  Come as you are.  Whoever you are, don’t worry about it.  Come, and walk humbly with your God.

 There’s some surprises in Jesus’ family, all right.  In fact, Jesus tells some scribes and religious types, in Matthew 21, that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…”  Harsh, but true.  Because these people who are messed up know that they’re messed up, and they come humbly to God, as they are.

 To go back to those disciples, the 12, they’re actually a bit surprising themselves.  If we think of the in-groups and out-groups, as the scribes might see it, the 12 includes some classic ‘outies’.  There’s a tax collector (Matthew).  There’s at least 4 ‘uneducated’ fishermen (they’re called uneducated in Acts 4:13).  There’s even a potential terrorist (Simon the Zealot).  At the end of the day, it’s not about what we are.  It’s about whose we are, and who He is.

 So the invitation to us all is: Come.  And walk humbly with your God, alongside all these other surprising people…  Look at your brothers and sisters in the family of Jesus.