10 Things I Wish Jesus Never Said Part 2 Making the Circle Bigger Who are my mother and my brothers? 3 July 2016 Ross Lester

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1 10 Things I Wish Jesus Never Said Part 2 Making the Circle Bigger Who are my mother and my brothers? 3 July 2016 Ross Lester Proposition Statement: Jesus enlarges our view of who is in our family and pushes us towards people who may not be like us but who share our faith. Passage and Main Points: And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you. 33 And he answered them, Who are my mother and my brothers? 34 And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother Jesus doesn t shrink our idea of family, he grows it a. So this jarred me a great deal whenever I used to read it. It did so for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because I love the tenderness of Jesus, and secondly I love my family, and here at first read it doesn t seem like Jesus is being tender, and it seems like he is minimizing the importance of his earthly family. So is Jesus undermining our traditional view of family in fairly callous way? He has certainly been accused of it, with Renan (a fierce critic of Jesus) saying Jesus was, trampling under foot everything that is human love and blood and family. 1 The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Mk 3:

2 b. This isn t what he is doing. We see Jesus elevate family in other places (Luke 2:51-52) and act so tenderly towards his mom in others (John 19:26-27). Jesus isn t breaking the OT command to honor your parents and isn t flying in the face of any of the biblical instructions around family. c. Jesus isn t trying to take away from our family, he is adding to it. He is making the circle bigger if you like. d. Now the problem is, we don t really believe him, and so we don t really practice this. I don t just wish Jesus didn t say this because I don t want him to reduce my nuclear family, but because I also don t want him to add to my family at all. I have a hard enough time loving and serving the people who share my blood and DNA, I don t trust Jesus sufficiently to believe that it will be to my benefit to have a bigger circle. e. But it will. How? Bigger Circle = Better Circle i. Our new family is diverse When he Jesus looks around the room and calls people his family, there are a bunch of different people in the room. Let s just back up a few verses to verse 16: 16 He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); 18 Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot, 19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. 2 You have highly educated and you have fishermen. You have Simon the Zealot, who would have been spent his whole life being educated in revolution and who would have seen his purpose in life as someone who was supposed to take 2 The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Mk 3:

3 back the land by force, and you Matthew, the tax collector, who helped raise the funds to take the land in the first place. We tend to think that the fist hearers would have loved this, but that they wouldn t have a complex understanding of our difficult and multi-faceted environments. They would have been looking around the room saying, no thanks. We have a deep and unrelenting desire for homogeny, but Jesus teaches us from the beginning that the people of God aren t like that. Look at what DA Carson says, The church itself is not made up of natural friends What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything of the sort. Christians come together, not because they form a natural collocation, but because they have been saved by Jesus Christ and owe him a common allegiance. In the light of this common allegiance they commit themselves to doing what he says and he commands them to love one another. In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus sake. This is good for us because who don t think like us make our thoughts richer. ii. Our new family is full of grace I love how Jesus looks around at the disciples and says that they are doing the will of God. That is a gracious statement if ever I heard one, because this is a truly struggly crew. They are not spiritual superstars. Far from it in fact. The thing about family is that you will put up with things from them that you wouldn t from anyone else. When Jesus expands the boundaries of our families, he is clearly calling us to extend the grace with the boundaries. 3

4 That is a messy grace that doesn t lead to no accountability, it leads to greater accountability. Because what unifies us is a push towards greater faithfulness. iii. Our new family is unified in obedience Jesus prioritizes those who are with him in obedience to his father over those who are standing in the way of obedience (even if they love him and are well intentioned). Here is the challenge, we tend to prioritize people we are closest to, and not people who push us towards faithfulness and obedience to God. Churches are supposed to communities of tremendous grace to be sure but ultimately of mutual sanctification. If you aren t growing in the faith, chances are you haven t positioned yourself near to someone who can help you grow in the faith. f. Obstacles to living in this new family: i. Faulty view of church Steve Timmis says, When church is little more than a meeting I go to or the building I enter, the idea of church as my family is nonsense. When my church family are people I see once or twice a week for a total of maybe three hours, it is ridiculous to think that I will submit to, or be involved in any meaningful sense with, these people. Our common inexperience of real, biblical church family is why these words of Jesus sound unwelcome, radical, and disconcerting. We have set the bar for church way too low, and so she disappoints again and again, because we continue to treat her as something she isn t. ii. Commitment to comfort Being a disciple of Jesus isn t a life of comfort, but we set it as first and foremost again and again. 4

5 We batten down the hatches and want to protect our nuclear families, when Jesus is offering us something bigger and better and altogether less convenient, but we don t believe him. iii. Desire for homogeny We want people around us to be like us. iv. Unbelief If we don t believe the gospel, then we won t believe that this type of family is better and we won t trust God to bless us and protect us in it. So let s talk that gospel quickly. 2. Jesus makes us part of his family a. Jesus doesn t just stand on the sideline yelling at us to love people like family. b. He wins a new family for us that he invites into. Look at Romans 8: 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba! Father! 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. 3 c. Co-heirs with Christ, with him as our big brother and God as our dad, but we must be identified with him. Conclusion: Not calling us today to another thing we should do, but to who Christ calls us to be. The call today is to faith. Do we trust Jesus? If we do, will we start to prioritize our new family? Into communion. 3 The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Ro 8: