On the cross, Jesus gets into it
with his mother. “Woman, behold thy son,” he says to her. Mary, look at the
child you are losing, the son that you are giving over for the sins of the
world. Maternal love is that love that loves in order to give away. In Mary’s
case, it was particularly so. When Jesus was born, old Simeon had predicted, “A
sword will also pierce your heart.” From the first, it was not easy to be the
mother of the Son of God. And now, even from the cross, Jesus is busy ripping
apart families and breaking the hearts of mothers. Because he was obedient to the
will of God, because Jesus did not waver from his God-ordained mission, he is a
great pain to his family. “Woman, behold thy son.”
In that day, in that part of the
world, there were no social attachments as rigid or determinative as that of
the family. Family origin determined your whole life, your complete identity,
your entire future. So one of the most countercultural, revolutionary acts of
Jesus was his sustained attack upon the family.
In a culture like our own,
dominated by “family values,” where we have nothing better to command our
allegiance to than our own blood relatives, this is one of the good things the
church does for many of us. In baptism, we are rescued from our family. Our
families, as good as they are, are too narrow, too restricted. So in baptism we
are adopted into a family large enough to make our lives more interesting.
“A new commandment I give to you
that you love one another as I have loved you,” he said elsewhere (John 13:34).
Watch closely. Jesus is forming the first church, commanding us to live as if
these foreigners were our relatives. Church is where we are thrown together
with a bunch of strangers and are forced to call these people with whom we have
no natural affinity, nothing in common, “brother,” “sister.”
So after this moment, never again
could the world say family without Jesus’ people thinking church.
On campus one evening, debating
the future of our fraternities and sororities, this student says, “One reason
why I love my fraternity is that it has forced me to be with a group of guys,
many of whom I don’t like—guys of a different race and culture from my own—and
call these losers ‘brother.’ That’s made me a better person than if I had been
forced to stay with my own kind.”
“I’ve never thought of a frat as
a church,” I said.
That day when they came to Jesus
saying, “Your mother and your brothers are looking for you,” Jesus responded
saying, “Whoever does the will of my Father, he is my brother.” In other words,
Jesus is naming and claiming a new family for himself, that family made up of
disciples. Now anybody who attempts to follow Jesus is one of the Family.
- From The Best of Will Willimon, Abingdon, 2012
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