Then his mother and his brothers came to him but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Luke 8:19-21
Everyone hears, but who really listens? His own family hears selectively. Mark tells us that they had decided Jesus was mad. It’s easy to imagine the older brother James calling a family conference, as he is evidently a take-charge kind of guy. What’s going on with Jesus? Is this Messiah business starting to get out of hand? After all, there is a lot of madness going around: plenty of demons freeloading on human hosts, and one of them may even have hitched a ride on big brother. He was always pretty intense, you know. We’d better to check it out, because he could get into serious trouble . . .
Whatever the family decided to do was doubtless “for his own good.” Let’s suppose that Mary, James, and Joseph Junior set out to find him. Perhaps they only wanted to check out the situation first: compare the crowd-sensation Jesus to the everyday-carpenter Jesus they had known in Nazareth, then make an evaluation and determine what to do from there.
Finding him is the easy part—everybody knows where he was last seen, and where he might be headed. Getting to him is another matter. He’s like a rock star barricaded by his entourage (though that analogy would not have occurred to them, of course). The house where he’s staying is not only filled, but packed five or six deep around the doors and windows. Let us through—we’re family!
Somebody agrees to pass on the message. After a while, word comes back: the Master says there’s a new definition of “family.” What I said about hearing? This applies. The family has been reorganized, with Jesus at its head. You become a part of it by first using your ears, then your hands and heart. Listen and do. His biological mother brothers never got a chance to speak to him. Because from now on, he does all the speaking, and eventually they will hear.
We are called to hear, even (or especially) when the interference is so loud it drowns out everything else. Like, for instance, we are tossed on the waves or circumstance, with a howling wind in our ears. Grief is like that, or shock, or unforeseen tragedy. Master! Master! We cry, barely able to hear our own voices. “Can you see what we’re going through? Don’t you care?” He’s right there. Though we hear no response, though he may seem to be asleep, he right there. In the boat. With us. When the time is right, he will get up and rebuke the circumstances as he rebuked that storm on the Sea of Galilee:
“PEACE! Be still.”
Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea, or demons or men or whatever it be, no waters can swallow the ship where lies the master of ocean and earth and skies.* All creation hears him. Sometimes even before his family and followers do.
*”Master, the Tempest is Raging,” by Mary A. Baker
For the original post in this series, go here.
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