NOTES for Luk 8:19-21

The situation described by the evangelist Luke in this passage can cause surprise and even indignation. Jesus' relatives come to Him, and they do not interrupt His conversation but wait patiently outside, yet He does not go out to see them. A natural question arises: is it possible to treat one's loved ones this way, and is this Christian?

But if we read these lines attentively, we will understand that the Lord is addressing not His mother and brothers, but those who surround Him; it is precisely for them that He says this. In contrast to the Old Testament understanding of kinship, which presupposed blood ties, Christ proceeds from an entirely new understanding of relationships. It turns out that the Lord becomes neighbor to the one who hears His Word. Every person receives the privilege of being the Lord's brother or sister. And no national, geographical, or temporal boundaries can limit these relationships.

For many people these words are a stumbling block; it seems to them that Jesus is cruel here toward relatives. But Jesus does not reject kinship according to the flesh; He exalts kinship according to the spirit. Just as bodily kinship is determined by a certain unity, genetic unity, with a parent, so spiritual kinship has as its source the one Father. But if the first was never chosen by us, the second is our free agreement with the Father's will. That is why there is no spiritual feat in bodily kinship, while there is a spiritual feat in spiritual kinship, and Jesus offers us such a feat.

"He answered them, My mother and My brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it." Today we read the Lord's words, which speak of the love between mother and child as something that leads beyond earthly feelings and becomes for us a kind of bridge to the knowledge of God's love. The parallels are close, even to the point that these words, like the words from the book of Sirach, cut and grate on the ear if they are read not prayerfully, but in the ordinary way.

But in order to try to understand, let us turn to the book of Psalms. "Have I not calmed and quieted my soul, like a child weaned from its mother? my soul is within me like a weaned child" (Ps 130:2). A great deal of what the Lord says is a direct answer to the questioning of the book of Psalms. This is understandable, for that book is a kind of sum of all prayerful sighing, of everything we want to say to God, while Christ is the center of what the Lord wants to say to us.

So let us look closely at this image of a child weaned from its mother's breast. This is how a person feels in the world: every person seeking the meaning of his life and the lives of those he loves, seeking a love that is not afraid of decay, seeking the sources of that inexpressible feeling of holiness that he senses in his chest. It is a brilliant image... The Lord gave birth to the human being into the world, nourished him, and released him from Himself, while the human being so longs to press his little nose to His breast again. Without Him it is so frightening, sad, lonely, cold, and hungry. These are human feelings.

But then Christ says... My mother and My brothers are those who hear the word of God... The reunion of mother and child, and of sisters and brothers with one another, has taken place; harmony has been restored with His coming into this world. Only it is strange: everything is reversed, and the images of mother and child appear to change places. Is this accidental? Was it just said because the occasion presented itself, because His mother came and His brothers came?

But nothing is accidental. Nothing is meaningless. As the great physicist Einstein said, "The Lord God does not play dice." Therefore in everything, in everything, we can look for meaning. So why did the images change places compared with the book of Psalms? Perhaps because pure love is a relationship between two who are fundamentally equal, or more precisely, commensurable. We cannot love an ant; it is too small. But we can love a kitten. Yet God is far more perfect than we are than we are more perfect than an ant; we are far less commensurable. And when this logic is broken through, one can no longer simply take the relationship of mother and child and place it directly on the relationship of God and His child. It is only a bridge. One can cross it in order to begin to know the love of God. And that means that the change of order alters nothing. The main thing is that the logic of incommensurability has been broken through; the main thing is that wholeness has been restored.

But there is also a simpler meaning. Perhaps Jesus is telling us that we are no longer little, that we are no longer infants; God has weaned us from His breast by bringing us into this world. Yet no longer, for all His love for us, can He put us to the breast again. Five-year-old children are not put to the breast.

Jesus' parables are something halfway between amusing stories from everyday life and riddles: in them He explains the inexpressible, the Message of His Kingdom, in simple human language. Many of them begin just this way: "The Kingdom of God is like someone who..." - and then He sketches a situation familiar to His listeners, revealing to them the essence of His Gospel.

So, the most famous parable is about how the Word of God, like a seed, must fall into fertile soil in order to bear fruit and not be lost in vain. The evangelist wonderfully completes the parable by giving, immediately after it, the account of Jesus' family, where He speaks to the disciples a new riddle that expresses the same Message in other words: "Whoever hears the Word and does it has entered My family".

The listeners only have to compare these parable-riddles to understand what the Kingdom consists in that their Teacher brought to earth. Through his book, the evangelist offers this task not just to the small circle of disciples, but to all readers of the Gospel.

The word, the seed sown by the sower, contains within itself the germ of the Kingdom of Heaven. Falling into our hearts, it begins to sprout into an ear of new life. But in this parable the sower does not act alone. Without soil—that is, without us—the seed cannot sprout. As Jesus observes, the more we participate in this process, the more fruit we bear. This produces an apparent injustice: the richer we are, the richer we become. Yet the issue here is probably not spiritual wealth, but how much of our capital—our time, attention, strength, and finally our whole life—we are willing to invest in this shared process of cultivating the Kingdom.