Mark 3:31-35

10/12/11 Mark 3:31-35 GUMC Youth

Tonight, we are going to look at Jesus in relation to his family and we are going to pay attention to how he reinterprets what it means to be family. What Jesus does here might be a bit surprising, it might even be shocking, depending on your own relationship to your own family, but like everything else that Jesus says, it certainly provokes some thought.

But before we get on to our text as it stands, we need to remember back to last week when Jesus got into a discussion with the scribes from Jerusalem. At the beginning of the passage, we read that Jesus was surrounded by a crowd, such a big crowd that he and his disciples were not able to sit down and eat a meal. There were so many people that there were people who couldn't get in to see Jesus. Some of the people who were kept out at that time were Jesus' family. We read, "When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"

Now, I suppose we have to ask the question, did Jesus' family also think that he had gone out of his mind or were they just concerned about his public image, and thus, their public image? Either way, we have to think that they might just be misunderstanding exactly who Jesus is and why he had come. We need to remember that we are dealing with the Son of God, who has always existed with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but had come among us human beings. This is the same God who told his people through the prophet Isaiah, "Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

You see, we are talking about a God whose ways and thoughts are so much higher than our own, that we have a hard time really understanding it. To give an example from natural science, when Einstein developed his theory of relativity and he and other scientists were making breakthroughs in subatomic physics, the rest of the world looked on and said, "That's ridiculous. All of your findings are irrational." Now that we have taken more time to really understand it, we realize that the problem wasn't that physics was becoming irrational, but because we just didn't have the tools to understand it. Relativity and Quantum physics isn't irrational, it is so completely and fully rational that our weak rationality needs to be transformed and improved before we can make sense out of it. It is not something altogether different with Jesus here. We are talking about God in our midst. Let me give you another example.

I have here a topographical map. Do you know what all the lines on this map mean? They are lines that represent how high something is above sea level. Every line represents a certain distance. The closer together they are, the more the land slopes, and the further apart they are, the flatter the land is. That is easy enough to understand, but do you see what we have done? We have taken a hilly landscape and squashed it down from three dimensions to two. It is entirely possible to represent three dimensions in two in as much detail as you would like, and it is entirely possible to become so good at reading maps like this at a glance that you could know almost exactly what the hills or mountains would look like without actually going there. But the point is that if you've never seen a map like this, you need to learn how to interpret it. There is much more there than meets the eye, but we can't see it at first. We need to be guided out of our ordinary habits and learn to see what is really there.

Again, this is not altogether different than what we have in Jesus Christ. Here we have God meeting us in our world of space and time. Jesus is a completely faithful representation of God among us, but that doesn't mean that we can understand him at first glance. He is the fullness of God in human flesh just like we have. To imagine that we human beings, even Jesus' own family, can understand him without some serious restructuring of our thoughts and lives is to misunderstand that Jesus is really God. The point is that, even though it takes some hard work and even though we have to be transformed in our knowing of God in Christ, we really can do it. God has actually revealed himself to us and has done so in a way that we actually can know God. Even though God declares that his ways and thoughts are above our ways and thoughts, the whole point was that we should turn to God and be forgiven, even if we can't fit everything into our preconceived notions.

Our passage, though, makes us ask the question, "Who is Jesus' family?" which is another way of asking the question, "Who is on the inside and who is on the outside?" At first, we want to respond, "It should be clear who Jesus' family is. After all, they are the ones he grew up with." And yet, Jesus turns this whole idea upside down. We read, "And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.'"

We need to make sure we understand this, because it is a big deal. In this moment, Jesus is saying that these people that raised him, that he grew up with, are not his real family, but that these other people, who he basically just met, are his real family. How many of you would do what Jesus did? How many of you would basically turn your back on your family in order to be with other people like this? Now, if you've got a pretty close relationship with your parents and siblings, the idea of cutting ties with them for any reason sounds ridiculous. Family is more important to you than anything else. Even if the whole world were to turn against you, you would still have your family who would love you and help you out. At one point, the whole world does indeed turn against Jesus, so the rubber really does meet the road for him.

In Jesus' day, we need to understand the incredible expectation that people had to respect and take care of their families. You probably remember that one of the Ten Commandments is, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." If you wanted to, you could make an argument that Jesus is not upholding that commandment here, and it is likely that someone probably made it at the time, even though we don't read about it here. Jesus' response to his family would not only have been personally offensive, but socially unacceptable. I had a class in seminary where we were looking at this passage and there was a student from Brazil, which has family values that are more similar to those of Jesus' culture than ours are here today. He was asked how his family and friends would have responded if he behaved like Jesus did here. He was clear that it would not have gone over well.

But we need to understand what Jesus is really getting at here. The main point is not, repeat not, to simply talk back to your parents and use Jesus as your reason. What Jesus is pointing out to us is that there are certain relationships that are closer even than family. There was a time when I was the only Christian in my family. Now my parents are back involved with the church but my brother still isn't. There have been many times in my life that, when I need to talk to someone about an issue in my life, I don't turn first to my family, but to my close Christian friends.

The fact of the matter is that the question, "Do I choose God or my family," will not probably arise for many of you. As far as I know, none of you are coming to youth group in defiance of your parents' wishes. Some of you might be here more because your parents want you to than because you want to be here yourself, but I am not aware if any of you are here even though your parents wished you didn't come. But that doesn't change the fact that, for many people throughout history, and even in the world today, this is a real choice they have had to make. Even in the Bible, look at the apostle Paul. He was a Pharisee, one of the people who set themselves firmly against Jesus during his ministry. During his pre-Christian life, Paul spent his time persecuting Christians, locking them up in prison, and supervising their execution. When he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, he had to choose between his friends and family and the God who had called him by name.

But it isn't just throughout history. I played music for the wedding of a friend in college who was from India. He came to America as a radical skeptic of the claims of Christian faith. He was culturally Hindu, but was not particularly religious in any meaningful sense of the term. He had a radical conversion, married a Christian, and became a full-time missionary around the world. If I recall, there was not even one member of his family at his wedding. This is partly because his family all lived in India and the wedding was in Cedar Falls, Iowa, but it was just as much due to the fact that, by becoming a Christian, he had chosen to be disowned by his family. This didn't happen in some far-off land in the distant past. This was like six years ago in Iowa!

Listen to the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans. "So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him."

What I want to lift up for you is the fact that we learn in the Bible that, when we are in Christ, we are made heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ. We are told that we are made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, knit together into a new family, a family that is so close, that the New Testament also talks about it as "the Body of Christ."

This is great, as long as we are talking about people that we like, but we don't always like everyone, do we? I want to make a connection that you may not have noticed. Last week, we talked about Jesus having conflict with the scribes who came from Jerusalem and now we have Jesus looking around and saying "Here are my mother and my brothers!" What you need to realize is that the scene hasn't changed. They are still in the same house, at the same time. We had read in the last passage that Jesus' family tried to get in earlier, but couldn't do it. Nobody has left and nobody has come in. It is the same group of people who were around last week and this week. That means that the people who came because they were interested in what Jesus had to say were there to hear Jesus say this, but it also meant that the scribes from Jerusalem were there, too.

Think about that, even though there were scribes from Jerusalem there, who had come for no other reason than to harass Jesus, he still said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." This doesn't mean that, magically, everyone present was a follower of Christ, but that Jesus didn't say to anyone, "You can't be part of my family." He didn't even say it to the people who were seeking to kill him. Jesus even called a Pharisee, one of the people who hated him the most, to be one of the most important Christian leaders in all of history. I had a professor who had a professor who said, "Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, but he didn't tell us that our neighbors are disgusting." Jesus calls us to love and to welcome, as family, even the people that we hate, that we would rather not be around. If Jesus can welcome and forgive the people who nailed him to the cross, surely we can welcome the people who annoy us.

The fact of the matter is that we are, in Christ, already bound to one another. You see, if I am in Christ, and if you are in Christ, then it doesn't really matter how different we are, we have one, incredibly important thing, in common, we are both in Christ. You and I are already family, you are all already family, not just with me and with each other, but with everyone who is in the other youth group, with everyone else in the church, with everyone in the youth groups around town, and with everyone in all the other churches. We don't always get along, but we are bound together by the blood of Christ, which is bigger than all of us. So, as we go into the world, and as we interact with one another, remember, day by day, that you are surrounded by family, because the people in this room as well as the people who go to other youth groups in town are all around you. But that isn't all. You are also surrounded by everyone else. But those people are not necessarily "not family." Rather, they are like the scribes in the audience; people who are simply not yet family. They are your long-lost cousins. Share with them the love and joy you have.

Let us pray.

AMEN