Who Is My Mother?
Rev. Elizabeth Grasham-Reeves
While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers
were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him,
‘Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to
speak to you.’ But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied,
‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his
disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever
does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and
mother.’ (Matthew 12:46-50)
Mother’s Day is coming up – a day when traditionally we buy our mom’s
cards, flowers, lunch and say nice things to them. It’s been a
heavily observed holiday my whole life and I never really thought
about the day and what it meant until my sister started trying to have
a baby and couldn’t for two years. Until a friend from college found
out that she had polycystic ovarian syndrome and would never be able
to carry a child. Until I started hearing political language about
women that reduced our value to our effectiveness at being bearers of
children. And even though I am a mother, I now approach this day with
some caution – caution because of the women in my life who mourn their
barrenness, caution because of the women in my life whom happily
choose to never have children, caution because while I find being a
mother a vocation worth celebrating, I know that it is not the single
most valuable thing that I, as a woman, can do. And I fear that this
day has turned into that – a day when we tell women – “Be a Mother.
This is what you are for.” I think Jesus would disagree.
In our scripture, Jesus is teaching his disciples and the crowd that
followed him when suddenly, his flesh-and-blood family approaches.
And when Jesus is told of their arrival he does something shockingly
cold – he seems to spurn his brothers and mother, rejecting them and
raising up the disciples around him as his new family. This raises
our eyebrows, but it would have thrown the people of his own time into
shock as well – what Jesus does here is reinterpret the very value of
relationships themselves and he re-grounds our value as people in
something totally other than cultural trappings. Jesus teaches his
disciples here, and elsewhere in our Bible, a startling truth: Who we
are in Christ takes precedence over any other facet of our life.
Though the fact is glossed over in our reading of this text, it’s
important to realize that Jesus’ family – his brothers, sisters and
even mother – are not a part of the group of disciples that follow
him. Even though they intimately know Christ, they are not with him.
That can’t be our story. Knowing Christ is not enough - We must LIVE
For Christ.
I love reading science fiction. And I’ve been reading it long enough
that I get some basic concepts - when there is a discussion about
string theory, or quantum physics, time dilation or relativity, I can
follow along pretty well. I can even talk about these theories on
simple levels - and to be honest, I feel pretty smart when I can do
that. But then my sister married an astrophysicist and all of my
pompous delight in being able to carry on conversations about string
theory were DASHED. Because my brother-in-law LIVES for physics - he
doesn’t just know about quantum theory, he writes papers on it. And
the minute I start talking with him, we are both painfully aware of
how little I actually know about the subject. He is too kind to rub
it in, though. He’s a good man.
In our scripture this morning, we have two groups of people - those
who know Christ from past experience - his mother, his brothers - and
those who LIVE for Christ - his disciples. You would think that Jesus
would be quick to welcome his family into the teaching moment, and
cultural expectations say that he should. His disciples and the
crowds that follow Jesus would expect that the moment Jesus’ family
shows up is the moment that Jesus turns to them and makes them his
focus. But in direct conflict with that expectation, Jesus does not
turn his focus onto his family. Instead, he turns his focus even more
directly upon his disciples and the truths of God’s kingdom that he
has to teach them. His family has privileged knowledge of his past,
but that doesn’t mean that they are actually his allies or friends.
Their knowledge of him is not enough - to be in the circle of
teaching, they must do more than know him, they must live for him and
his teachings. And they haven’t. So they are excluded.
If you ran up to Christ with a question, how would he respond to you?
Would he disavow your relationship or would he welcome you in as a
brother or sister in Christ? Or to put it more simply: do you just
know about Jesus or do you live for him? This is the difference
between a cultural faith and a living faith. This is the difference
between church as a chore and church as an encounter with the living
God. This is the difference between God as an afterthought and God as
your foundation. James and the brothers of Jesus grew up with him -
but they were among the last to believe, not the first. Mary was
visited by angels and had privileged information about who Jesus was -
but that wasn’t enough to follow him. Maybe you’ve grown up in
church, maybe you’ve always gone to worship, maybe you’ve read your
Bible everyday - but that doesn’t mean you’re living for God. Knowing
and being are not the same - and Jesus doesn’t need a bunch of people
who can intellectually affirm him. He needs disciples who actually
obey the word of God. Is that you?
To belong to Christ rather than just to know him, that is the
beginning of our journey of faith. And I say beginning because there
is much more to our life with Christ than just the beginning. This
journey we are on is one that is deeply rooted in how we know
ourselves. And the way we know ourselves now is not enough - We must
be REDEFINED by Christ.
My sister and her family to a different country last year and that has
been quite a change. The language is the same - sort of. But the
humor is not, the TV commercials are not, the stores are not, the
people are not, the weather is not. The move across the ocean was
difficult enough on its own, but added to that was the difficulty in
being separate from my parents before knowing if my dad was fully in
remission from his cancer. She posted, though, on her Facebook a
quote by T.S. Eliot that I found incredibly poignant - “Things don’t
go away. They become you. There is no end, but addition.” My sister,
her family, her life are being redefined by their experiences and time
in another country. But she is not being made less by that
redefinition - there is no end to her old life, but merely addition.
Being redefined, being remade is not always about stripping away all
the former, but sometimes it is about taking on something new in
addition to.
As we dive deeper into our scripture, we see Jesus redefine what
family is. When told of the arrival of his mother and brothers, he
says something just a little bit offensive: “Who is My mother and who
are My brothers?” And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He
said, “Behold My mother and My brothers!” The disciple are probably
just as shocked as Jesus’ blood family when Jesus says this. They
have thought of themselves as his followers, his disciples, his
students, his servants, his friends - but to think of themselves as
actual brothers? And which one of them is the mom? Somehow, the
truths of the kingdom that Jesus is teaching binds them more deeply
and permanently than blood - this gospel that they are learning and
living out is more than just theory, but the practice of being BORN
into a totally different family. And that is subversive - Jesus
unflinchingly teaches that when you belong to God, you belong to God
and God’s family FIRST before you belong to any other family. That
was probably tough to hear and hard to believe.
Redefinition is hard, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It was hard to
go from single to married, from childless to parent, from student to
minister. And you all have experienced similar transitions, similar
re-definitions of who you were - parent to grandparent, working to
retired or working to unemployed, healthy to sick, financially stable
to financially dependent. When we become something new, even when
that newness is expected, we struggle to understand who we are in a
new context. But here’s the key - if we are letting Christ do the
“re-defining” for us, then how we understand ourselves changes.
Because if Christ is leading, I understand myself as HIS before all
things. Before I am a mother, a wife, a child, a minister, I am Jesus
of Nazareth’s disciple - his sister in the kingdom. The central most
important aspect of who I am is wrapped up in Jesus Christ. In fact,
the best thing that I can be, the most critical part of my life is no
longer wrapped up in what the world thinks or expects - it is wrapped
up in my obedience to a life in Christ Jesus. And that goes for you
too. How long has it been since you lived your life with your
identity in Christ as the most important part? How long has it been
since you defined yourself by God’s values rather than the world’s?
And how long has it been since you defined and understood the people
around you according to God’s values? When was the last time you met
a stranger and thought “this is a child of God!” rather than “please
don’t talk to me, I’m busy.” On this journey of faith, where we live
for Christ, where we are redefined by God, it is not enough to see
ourselves differently. We must also see the friends, family,
strangers and enemies around us differently. The way we now know
others is not enough - We must allow Christ to OPEN our EYES.
My maternal grandparents used to live in a house that was surrounded
by a softwood “forest.” My cousins and I would spend hours and hours
and hours out in the woods, building forts, climbing trees, getting
poison ivy and chigger bites, making memories. One summer day when we
were exploring parts of the woods we didn’t know very well, we came
across rusting car parts. In fact, we came across an entire car, torn
into pieces and crumbling into reddish-orange debris. Instead of
asking what had happened, we came up with all sorts of imaginary tales
including one that had to do with the mafia (in Arkansas?) and getting
rid of evidence. When we finally got around to telling our parents
what we’d found, my mom told me a story I will never forget: the car
used to belong to my grandma. But one day the car had malfunctioned
and crashed while my grandma was driving it. And my grandfather was
so angry that his wife had been in danger, that he ripped the car into
pieces and threw it into the woods. I will NEVER EVER look at my
grandpa the same way again.
Jesus had a way of teaching, of telling stories, of speaking about God
that was shocking and new. The minute his disciples thought they knew
what was coming, Jesus would say something like “You have heard it
said, but I say to you...” and then something unexpected happen. But
what Jesus did best was teach his disciples a new way to see each
other, to see their families, to see their enemies. The disciples
grew up in a culture that de-valued women, but Christ opened their
eyes to the radical kingdom of God by including women as his
disciples. The disciples grew up in a culture that taught them to
hate their Samaritan cousins, but Jesus opened their eyes by sharing
the good news with a Samaritan woman. The disciples were expecting a
military messiah, but Jesus opened their eyes to who he truly was by
dying on a Roman cross. And when Jesus taught them “for whoever does
the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister
and mother,” he was opening their eyes again - introducing them to a
world full of people they had never seen before but with whom they
would now be family with. Strangers who were just as valued by God as
they.
Outside of the doors of your home and safe place, in churches down the
street and in different cities and countries filled with people I
don’t know and probably disagree with, are also my brothers and
sisters. God is the one who sets the parameters for what this kingdom
family looks like and that means we have got a lot of siblings that we
don’t know and may not like. But that doesn’t matter - because Jesus
binds us all together. Jesus looks you straight in the face and says
- You are mine. We are family. And then he turns to a stranger and
says - you are mine. We are family. And that’s how it is. And that
family tie robs us of our pompous righteousness of being “chosen”;
that family tie strips us of our inclination to hate the stranger
among us; that family tie humbles us because we have all just been
declared equal to each other - not because we’re all awesome parents
or children; not because we’re all successful or rich; not because we
are white or black or Asian or middle eastern or capitalist or
socialist; not because of what we’ve done or what we can do or our
educations or family background. Nothing we achieve unites us or
gives us value - we are united and valued because of Christ. End of
story. Or really....the beginning of the story.
Jesus redefined family and took a person’s value out of what society
said was normal and expected. Instead, Jesus reminded his disciples
that as a man or woman, the best and most righteous thing you could do
was belong to God. That no matter the family you were born into
first, when you walked with Christ, you were born into a new family.
A bigger family. A better family. On Mother’s Day we celebrate and
affirm the value of the women in our congregation and in our lives who
are mothers. And while that’s nice, it’s also short sighted.
Instead, we should turn to the women in our lives and say to them -
whether you have children or not, whether you work at home or in an
office, whether you make money or not, whether you are white, black,
rich, poor, educated or self-taught, you have value because you are my
sister in Christ. God chooses you, and so do I. That’s what Christ
did. That’s what we should do. And why? Because, Who we are in
Christ takes precedence over any other facet of our life.
Blessings,
Rev. Elizabeth Grasham-Reeves
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