Luke 8:19 – 21 The True Kindred of Jesus

Luke 8:19 – 21 The True Kindred of Jesus

Then his mother and his brothers came to him but were unable to join him because of the crowd. He was told, "Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and they wish to see you." He said to them in reply, "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it."

I don’t know that I can deal with this topic today. I guess I must need to, or the Lord wouldn’t have sent this scripture to me today. Last Sunday’s gospel was from Mark. In it Jesus spoke of the difficulty in being a prophet in your own community. The people there were so immersed in his humanity (because he grew up there) that they refused to accept his divinity. In the course of the gospel passage mention is made of Jesus brothers and sisters in some amount of detail including the names (James, Joses, Judas, Simon) of some of them. The priest in his homily (not my home parish in Londonderry) went out of his way to explain that these were not Jesus literal brothers and sisters, just extended family members. When I heard this I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or cry. The amount of time and energy (and probably violence) that the church has spent to say/promote things that are not found in the gospel but “deducted” through torturous (male) reasoning or made up entirely for questionable purposes, stuns me. Take the Immaculate Conception, the enduring virginity of Mary, the infallibility of the pope, purgatory, the insistence on men only for the ministers and officers of the Church. The list goes on and on and fills me will pain and sadness. It always seems to come down to controlling the messenger or controlling the message, or perhaps just controlling. The church hierarchy should look into its own heart, admits its faults and failings, and ask for penance and forgiveness. Without that I fear for its future. If only it modeled itself on Christ – his humility, his love, his mercy, his selflessness – then the power of that example would in truth “renew the faith of the earth”. Come Holy Spirit, help me find my role in all this.