“Who is Family?”     (Mk 3:31-5)

To better digest this story about Jesus’ question, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” I ask you to try a little exercise in imagination.

You’re at a family wedding, brothers and sisters, mother and father, cousins and children and nieces and nephews, all filling the hall. But it’s one of those mega-halls that accommodates 6 different weddings at the same time. At some point in the reception, an announcement comes over the PA system that all 6 parties are to assemble in the grand ballroom. When you get there, you see people who are very different looking – Iranian, Chinese, African, very rich, very poor, even one made up of mostly handicapped members. Then, someone from your family steps out into the center and says to you and your family, “If you really want to know, very many of these other people here are also my real brothers and sisters!”

Imagine how that would go over!  On hearing it, a first impulse could be anger. “How can you put them in the same boat with us, your blood brothers and sisters whom you grew up with, who “knew you when,” and who would take you in if you were in trouble?”  But if you were to let the shock settle in some, might there be a second, more generous reaction too? “You mean that down deep we’ve actually got more in common with these strangers and foreigners than differences. You mean it actually makes some sense that we all should gather in here the same room?”

This scenario is a window onto this gospel today. Jesus is together with his blood family, but also together with lots of others who are not in his family. And he asks, “Who are my brothers and sisters?” The text continues, “And looking around at those seated in the circle he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’”

Here is Jesus shockingly redrawing the boundaries of who is in the family, of who is really in. That first reaction of anger (“Those types, on the same level with us?”) is understandable. But that second one, (“Down deep we’re all in the same room, the room of being-loved-by-God and trying to do God’s will.”) is possible too.

And isn’t something much like that unity just what we try to move toward when we come together to celebrate this Eucharist, this making-present of the Meal of Reconciliation?