DNA Swab

Tuesday of Week 3 in Ordinary Time

Mark 3:31-35

This is a curious episode. 

So far in Mark’s Gospel the cross is never off the stage.  Jesus has called some.  He has constituted the new Israel…The Twelve.  And now there begins the teaching on how this New Israel is to relate…beginning with the family.

We have seen some homey settings…entering the home of Simon and Andrew (1:29), returning home and healing the paralytic (2:1-12), and dining with Levi, the tax collector.  Just how ‘homey’ is Jesus?

Home = Wherever Jesus happens to be.

When I imagine myself as Jesus’ mother, I feel the challenge this ‘New Israel’ implies.  The very heart of what I have always thought of as ‘identity’ is challenged.  Who am I if not my birth, my family…the results of my DNA swab?

When I imagine myself as one of Jesus’ close disciples, and I am sitting at his feet in the synagogue while his family is outside thinking him beside himself aka crazy…well then I appreciate the broad sense of kinship that is grounded in a different answer to the question, Who am I?

Family = Whoever does the will of God

But doing that will, demands time sitting at the feet. 

A deep, deep challenge for this 21^st century individualist!