NOTES for Mat 12:46-50

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.

The Lord Jesus Christ offers us an incredible gift in today's passage from Matthew's Gospel. It might seem sufficient for us if He merely freed us from enslavement to evil. On our own, we would hardly desire anything more than deliverance from death. In the highest manifestations of the human spirit, we might conceive of serving God in His creation of the world in which He settled us. But the Lord is not content even with this.

He wants everyone who comes to Him to become a member of His family. He nourishes us with His Blood and Flesh so that we may become of one blood with Him. And since Jesus Himself and His All-Pure Mother are wholly obedient to the Father's will, He calls us too to fulfill that will and thereby become His brother and sister and mother.

Surprisingly often, people reading this passage for the first time ask, “Why does Jesus hurt His Mother so much?” But He is not hurting the Most Pure Virgin with these words; He is offering us the possibility of being raised up to Her level.

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.

As can be seen, Jesus' attitude toward blood ties is, if not always negative, always restrained and critical. Such an attitude seems surprising if we consider the role that tribal and clan identity played in Jewish society. In fact, belonging to the people of God itself was defined by clan and tribal lines. Yet Jesus pushes family ties into the background.

One might, of course, think that Jesus is a man of another era, the era of Hellenistic civilization and great empires. In that era a person's origin meant less than his personality. But the issue, as can be seen, is still not only the era, especially since Jewish society remained very conservative with regard to clan and family ties.

Jesus, of course, does not say by chance that his relatives are those who do the will of God. And the point here is not only that he needed like-minded people and helpers. The point lies in the very essence of blood relationships. They are certainly a powerful binding factor among people in a fallen world, and in this lies their strength. But in this also lies their weakness: by binding people to one another, they also bind them to the untransformed order of things, including them in that order as firmly as nothing else can. Then it turns out that for the sake of the Kingdom blood ties must, if not be broken completely, at least be pushed into the background.

It would seem that such a decision rules out the very possibility of doing anything for the salvation of one's loved ones. But that is not always so. In order to save others, one must first oneself share in the life of the Kingdom, whose breath alone is saving. As long as relationships that were purely natural do not change their quality, such sharing will remain impossible. On the other hand, the spiritual transformation of a Christian's life often objectively disrupts former blood ties if relatives do not walk the same path with him: if one of them is ready to build relationships with a neighbor according to the laws of the Kingdom and the other is not, relations between them will in essence become impossible. But the one who has not yet begun his path into the Kingdom will have the opportunity to make use of the support of his Christian relative if and when he does begin that path, because that relative will be ready for new relationships and will "catch" them as soon as the person taking the first step feels the need for them.

Such blood ties, transformed by the breath of the Kingdom, can become not a brake but a help for spiritual life. And Jesus, knowing this, does not cling to the old, but offers his followers a new life with renewed relationships.

No miracle can prove anything by itself. Those who witnessed the healings Jesus performed could always explain them however they wished, even making absurd claims that these events were satanic in nature. The dispute over whether something is “from God or not from God,” directed here not so much at the miracle as at Jesus Himself, has no evidentiary basis. This is also clear from the history of Christian apologetics: every claim and argument in favor of Christ has met a counterargument, all of them ultimately amounting to the same thing: this does not follow from anything; it has not been proved. Is this not what the Lord Himself says when, in response to a request for irrefutable proof, for a sign, He gives the “sign of Jonah” as an example and links it with His resurrection from the dead? The paradox is that this “sign” was not proof of the prophet's preaching. The Pharisees who demanded a sign never saw the risen Christ: He appeared only to those who remained faithful to Him. This means that the sign of the Resurrection works only in the realm of the Spirit; it can be proof only for those who themselves want to share in the mystery of Christ.

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.