“Does family come first?”   

The Christian Church generally regards families as a good thing, a foundational building block of a stable society. Indeed, some churches are keen to tell us that they “uphold family values and believe that healthy families make up a healthy Church” – although I suspect they have a very specific picture of what a family is like. There’s a Baptist church near Chicago which takes a commitment “to strengthen marriages and the family” as one of its “Core Values”. And even Pope Francis has said that one of the Church’s greatest challenges is to “defend the family from all ideological and individualistic assaults”.

You’d assume that these churches and Christian leaders have taken their lead from Jesus. But, as we start to read through the Gospels, a rather different and surprising picture begins to emerge. For instance, Jesus invited the disciples to leave their families and join him on a very uncertain pilgrimage: one wonders if Zebedee managed to keep his fishing business afloat once James and John had dropped their nets in order to follow Jesus. That’s not all: other potential disciples were told that they could not “go and bury their dead” or even say a proper good-bye to their families if they were serious about following Jesus. Their allegiance had to be single-minded in the extreme.

The Church has sometimes endorsed Jesus’ views in ways which may well horrify us. For instance Pope Urban II called men to “sign-up” for the First Crusade by quoting Jesus’ words from Matthew’s Gospel: “He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me … Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life”. In other words the Pope was promising a place in heaven to those who abandoned their families to fight, so his preachers enticed hundreds or thousands of men to take up the cross and sword. Many of them were killed in battle and never came home, which means that the Christian faith (or, at least, an interpretation of it) had first separated and then destroyed families. That sounds more like Muslim extremism than the faith we know and love.

But even if we don’t “buy into” that view, it’s clear that Jesus divided families as much as uniting them. And today’s story is a case in point. For, while Jesus is teaching a group of people in a crowded house, his mother and brothers arrive. You’d naturally expect Jesus to stop what he was doing and greet them: the crowd certainly thinks that this is what he will do so, when he appears to take no notice of his relatives, they tell him that they are outside and asking for him. But Jesus barely pauses to take breath; instead he retorts: “Really? Who, then, are my true mother and my brothers? It’s not them, but you – everyone who does God’s will!” Jesus’ apparent rudeness takes us aback: it’s certainly not what we expect of him!

Before we go any further, we need to think a bit about “family” meant in the ancient world. And we must realise that it meant much more than our concept of parents and children, vaguely linked to a few aunts, uncles and grandparents, possibly spread around the world. In Jesus’ time the extended family meant everything. It was the building-block of society and the source of one’s status in the community. It functioned as the primary economic, religious, educational and social network. Losing your connection to the family meant the loss of these vital networks and also the loss of your land. Even more, it was seen as the rejection of your key social obligation. In fact, a person who cut themselves off from their family wasn’t just being “a bit odd”; what they were doing was destructive, shameful and, in fact, inconceivable.

So what’s going on in our story? First, we see Jesus deliberately ignoring his close family members instead of showing them proper respect. He doesn’t give them his time and attention, he doesn’t even bother going to them or finding them honoured places at the front of the crowd. He treats them like any late-comers and gives them no special privileges: in fact they are virtually ignored. Second, we see Jesus explicitly redrawing the lines of relationship and commitment. He declares that the usual bonds of blood, kinship and marriage are less important than the bonds of faith; he prioritises his listeners over his own mother: how shocking is that! Finally, adding insult to injury, Jesus declares that the members of his new ‘spiritual’ family are “those who do the will of God”. The implication is clear: Mary and her other sons are resisting God; they may consider themselves to be good Jews but, to Jesus, they are infidels who are refusing to ‘see the light’.

We also need to notice precisely where this story is placed in Mark’s Gospel. For although it comes at a time when Jesus seems to be enjoying huge popularity, we can also see storm clouds starting to gather on the horizon. For, in the public sphere, Jesus has had his first spats with the religious leaders of the day who, even at this early stage in the story, are now “out to get him”. Equally, Jesus has been accused of doing miracles “by the power of Beelzebub” or the Devil; he ridicules the suggestion but is dismayed to discover that his family members have gone along with public opinion and are now doing all they can to silence and restrain him. They clearly think he’s crazy and that hurts. Can’t they trust him?

I think I’m right in saying that this is the first time that Mark mentions Jesus’ family. For this Gospel gives us no beautiful pictures of our Lord’s birth: in it we only meet Jesus as a fully-grown adult. And it’s quite clear that, at this moment in time, Jesus has nonplussed his relatives. They are wondering why he has turned into a religious fanatic. They want him to forget this preaching lark and return to the family business. For, if he does that, his life will be safe and the family will not suffer shame. There’s just enough time for Jesus to do the sensible thing; very soon it will be too late. They are desperate. But Jesus isn’t prepared to play their game, as he’s concerned with one thing alone: obeying his heavenly Father and associating with those who will do likewise. (How much Mary’s heart must have been stabbed every time she heard him say something like that, as it reminded her both that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ Father and that her son’s future had been planned out by God). Jesus makes it very clear that the familial relationships which have been built up over many years in Nazareth have now been replaced by new ones; Mary and her other children no longer have first place in his life. To a degree this happens whenever a young person flexes their wings, leaves home and forms new relationships. But Jesus takes it to a new extreme.

Now there are many Christians around the world who are forced to make a clear choice between family and God. Converts can face enormous pressure from their families to abandon their new faith, and may be accused of rejecting their family’s tradition and bringing shame upon it. They can be banned from the family home, they can be ostracised by their community, in extreme cases they can be murdered in so-called “honour killings”. While the situation for the first-century Christians who would read Mark’s Gospel was not probably quite that severe, they were still members of an ill-favoured group who needed to stick together as a family to survive.

Our situation is different but we nevertheless face subtle yet powerful pressures. This means that, at times, we must decide whether our primary loyalties lie with God or with our family. Sometimes, of course, we have no choice in the matter; but my feeling is that Christians too easily roll over and say, “Oh. but of course my family comes first” without ever realising that Jesus said exactly the opposite. For he knew that “family” could be yet another powerful “idol” which draws us away to God, that our faith will sometimes lead us to take decisions which our unbelieving relatives will find offensive or incomprehensible. In fact, the way we interact with our families may turn out to be the sternest test of our Christian commitment.

For there will be occasions when we have to swim against the tide of family opinion and make decisions which we know will cause misunderstanding or difficulty, occasions when we can only say, “Sorry, no, God comes first”. These may be when we have committed ourselves to a task in the Church or community, something that our relatives probably regard as a leisure activity which we can simply “miss” whenever a family party or activity comes along. Or we might have to explain that our Christian principles forbid us from investing in an unethical business deal with family members who have no such qualms and expect us to join in. Or we may simply feel that we can’t join in an expensive family holiday because we feel that the money could be better spent on other things. It’s at times like these that we must be prepared to take the resultant criticism and accusations of priggish self-righteousness on the chin, leaning over backwards to explain our reasons and to assure our relatives of our continued love.

What I’ve said this morning may have surprised our shocked you. But we cannot escape the fact that Jesus asks his followers to redefine their relationships: our primary allegiance as Christians is to him and his people. For it was Jesus who said, “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law”. It was Jesus who said, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters cannot be my disciple”: that’s part of carrying our cross And it was Jesus who said, “Your foes will be members of your own household”. Of course we love our families, it’s right and proper that we do. The question we must ask ourselves is whether we love our Lord and Master even more?