Our Calling, Our Family – Part 2
Biological and adoptive families are a gift from God. They are the building blocks of society and the Church of Jesus. But Jesus seems to point us to another level of family, one centered in our faith in Him.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’s family traveled from Nazareth to Capernaum to see Him. At the time Jesus was ministering to a crowd of people at His home in Capernaum. His family knocked on the door. Whoever answered the door, came back to Jesus and said, “Your mother and your brothers are here.”
The passage in Matthew doesn’t say why they had come to see Him, but I think there are four possible reasons based on Scriptures in the other Gospels.
1. They were a religious family. They saw the rift between Jesus and the Jewish religious establishment and the Roman Empire. Because of this they may have gone there “to talk some sense into Him.”
2. Mark 3:21 says, “When His family heard about this, they went to take charge of Him, for they thought He was out of His mind.”
3. They feared for their own safety if Jesus kept going with His declarations and ministry. Maybe they thought the authorities would come after them.
4. Mary might have thought that Jesus didn’t understand the divine majesty in Him remembering what the angel, Gabriel said about Him.
The bottom line was that His family didn’t believe on Him. John 7:5 says, “For even His own brothers did not believe in Him.
Back to the story.
The person who answered the door when Jesus’s family knocked, went back to Jesus and said, “Your mother and your brothers are here.”
Jesus’s response was, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers? Then He gestured to the disciples around Him and said, “Behold my mother and my brothers.”
Why did Jesus say this?
He was reorienting our understanding of the meaning of family.
He wasn’t denigrating earthly families; He was lifting our sights to see a family that transcends biological and adoptive families.
It’s God’s family!
In the next verse Jesus explains, “Whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my mother and my brother and my sister.”
We are all adopted into God’s family through the blood of Jesus when we accept Him as our Lord and Savior. As followers of Christ, our new address is “in Christ Jesus.”
That makes us family!
In Christ, we have a common Father.
That makes us family.
It’s time for us as Christians, no matter what local church we attend, to see ourselves as members of God’s family. You are fundamentally not a member of a local church. You are a member of God’s family!
If the value of God’s family is greater than earthly families, then how do we this thing called, God’s family together? What does it look like?
We will take a look at this question next week.