What has Christ's coming given us? Salvation from evil? Yes, of course... but evil and suffering did not vanish from the world by the wave of a magic wand. Jesus Himself not only endures terrible sufferings on the Cross; He endures them innocently. And He also says that those who want to be His disciples should likewise take up their cross and follow Him. In what, then, does this salvation from evil consist?

Perhaps this is too human an approach. In one of the Gospel readings Jesus reminds us that if you have merely been freed from an evil spirit, but its place in your heart remains unoccupied, in the end something even worse will overtake you. Salvation only from what we consider bad is, alas, too little. Too little for a person who looks the truth in the face. But, fortunately, it is too little for the Creator as well.

And therefore He offers us something immeasurably better: adoption. We can enter the family of Jesus of Nazareth and become His adopted brothers and sisters. More than that, the possibility of an exceptional, essential union with Him is open to us, the same as His Mother's. To be brothers of Jesus, and therefore to be adopted by His Father and His Mother, to share His divine-humanity with Him, only one thing is required: to say to the Father as Jesus Himself says, "Not My will, but Yours be done."

Salvation from the unpleasant, the bad, the evil is a human approach. Such escapism is hardly proper to God. He does not flee from evil, but confronts it on the Cross and conquers. You may seek comfort and sweet piety, but then from the hell of violence you will go straight into the hell of hypocrisy; or you may agree to adoption by the Heavenly Father. Yes, this is a difficult path, at times painfully difficult, and your adopted Brother, Jesus, died on it. But by becoming His brother, you will also share His victory over evil. The choice between defeat, flight, and victory is yours.

In this episode Jesus may at first seem hard-hearted. Indeed, it is strange to see a preacher so absorbed in spreading His teaching that a crowd of admirers becomes so much dearer to him than his relatives that he is ready to trade his own Mother and brothers for them. Yes, any demagogic speaker in such a situation would look unattractive.

But when we consider the Gospel account carefully, we will have to admit that Christ's words contain no renunciation either of His Mother or of His brothers. After all, He called those who do the will of the Heavenly Father His brothers and mother. And did not Mary open herself to God with the greatest fullness? Did she not become the Mother of Christ precisely because she fulfilled the will of the Heavenly Father? The brothers are a somewhat different matter: they did not have Mary's spiritual experience and did not immediately recognize Jesus as the Christ. But the time will come when they will see and accept what is still hard for them to accept now. Then they will become brothers not only by kinship.

Has the Kingdom of God reached us? In the Gospel the Lord connects the coming of the Kingdom, on the one hand, with victory over the forces of evil, over Satan, and on the other hand, with the action of the Holy Spirit in people's lives. For it is by the Spirit that He casts out demons and heals diseases, and in denying this fact the Lord points to the danger of unforgivable blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. So the Kingdom of God not only awaits us beyond the grave, but is also realized here on earth, wherever people give the Holy Spirit the opportunity to act through them. The actions of the Spirit can be very diverse (1 Cor chs. 12-13), but the chief one is love. Therefore, to reach the Kingdom, little is required of us: first, complete trust in and openness to God, allowing His Spirit to act in our life; and second, attentiveness to His actions, allowing us not to quench His life in us, but on the contrary, to respond to it with thanksgiving.