Jesus' answer to His relatives' request to see Him may seem too harsh. Meanwhile, in other cases He turns this harshness into a principle: whoever does not...
Jesus' answer to His relatives' request to see Him may seem too harsh. Meanwhile, in other cases He turns this harshness into a principle: whoever does not hate father and mother, He says, cannot be My disciple. Of course, hatred here must be understood in the biblical sense, in a broader sense than the one to which we are accustomed. For us, hatred is inseparable from the desire to destroy what is hated, to make it disappear from the face of the earth. In the Bible hatred can be like that too, but not always. Often it implies only the desire to exclude something from one's own life, completely ending any interaction with the hated thing or, when people are involved, any fellowship with them.
Does this mean that Jesus wants to exclude His relatives from His own life and advises others to do the same? At first glance it may seem so. Of course, if we speak about Him Himself and, in some cases, about one of His disciples, such a choice can be considered the only possible one. Here it is simply a matter of the particular features of a ministry and a path that exclude any family or kinship ties whatever. Christian history and practice know such a path, although a calling to it is a rare enough phenomenon; this is not the rule, but exceptions to it.
Yet something else is also present here: the denial of the absoluteness and self-sufficient value of natural kinship ties and relationships. For fallen humanity, kinship, especially blood kinship, is one of the main psychophysical bonds on which a great deal rests. Physiology here forms a strong alloy with the lower psyche characteristic of fallen humanity, and this alloy joins relatives into a single whole. Sometimes they themselves are not glad of it, but they can do absolutely nothing about it, because the nature of fallen humanity is usually stronger than its spirit.
Such bonds are completely incompatible with the Kingdom and its life, as Jesus testifies with full decisiveness. They are incompatible not because such kinship is bad in itself, but because relationships of this kind and the bonds that generate them usually remain very little conscious for the people bound by them. This means that their spiritual component, if it is not equal to zero, tends toward zero. Relationships must become different; they must be determined not by blood but by spirit. Then they will become fit for the Kingdom. This, however, will already be another kinship, not reducible to nature alone, a kinship consciously built by those who want it and strive for it.
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3:31 Then come his brethren and his mother - Having at length made their way through the crowd, so as to come to the door. His brethren are here named first, as being first and most earnest in the design of taking him: for neither did these of his brethren believe on him. They sent to him, calling him - They sent one into the house, who called him aloud, by name. Mat 12:46; Luk 8:19.
3:34 Looking round on them who sat about him - With the utmost sweetness; He said, Behold my mother and my brethren - In this preference of his true disciples even to the Virgin Mary, considered merely as his mother after the flesh, he not only shows his high and tender affection for them, but seems designedly to guard against those excessive and idolatrous honours, which he foresaw would in after ages be paid to her.