Thank you for listening to the daily podcast from STC Sheffield.  Our Bible reading today is Matthew 12 vs38-50, and we’re going to focus on verses 46-50:

“While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him.  Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’  He replied to them, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’  Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

REFLECTION:

In this challenging time, I wonder how your relationships with other people have been?

Has it been a challenge to be in lockdown or self-isolation with the people you live with – when it’s just you, and them, and the same 4 walls?  You love them dearly, but let’s be honest, you could do with a break!

Or are you a raging extrovert who has struggled with the fact that you can only meet 5 other people at a time, and who is secretly terrified of the thought of not being able to see anyone from another household when a local lockdown happens?

Or perhaps you find it hard to feel connected over Zoom or Facetime, and therefore have just absented yourself from relationships and groups that you were previously committed to?

Whatever your experience, maintaining relationships is certainly a challenge during these Covid times.

As we saw on Monday, in these chapters of Matthew, Jesus is also experiencing a challenging time – and one of those challenges was regarding his relationships.

In today’s passage, Jesus’ mother and brothers are mentioned at the end of a long speech Jesus gave to the Pharisees and the gathered crowd. However, if we look at Mark’s Gospel, it is clear they have been present all along. In Mark Chapter 3 v21 we learn that they had gone to “take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.” In other words, Jesus’ mother and brothers had come to tell him off, to get him to stop talking nonsense, and to take him back home where they could control him!

I think it’s fair to say that Jesus is experiencing some challenges within his family relationships.

This account is included in Luke’s gospel as well.  However, these 3 writers don’t mention this moment in Jesus’ ministry in order to give every teenager from then on permission to ignore their parents, and refuse to come home when they turn up at the door of a friend’s house late at night. Nor does it give us, as adults, the license to just walk away from relationships if things are challenging.  We know this because in Matthew 12 verse 25 Jesus said, “a family that’s in a constant squabble disintegrates.”

Instead what we seeis that in the midst of challenging times Jesus promotes relationship; but he does so in such a way that is powerfully counter cultural.  He wants to transform our understanding of family, and our commitment to relationship.

Let’s unpack that a bit more……….

The Old Testament talks a lot about family as we would recognise it. There are chapters where we read verse after verse of names ‘who was the son of, who was the son of…….. whose mother was, whose father was’ et cetera, et cetera. This is family based on lineage and descent. Identifying family in this way was particularly important in Old Testament times, as it was the channel through which property, land and money was passed on, and it was the place where people would submit to authority and be disciplined.

Therefore, by refusing to speak to his mother and brothers, and not leaving with them, Jesus is saying that he will not submit to their authority nor be disciplined by them.However, when Jesus takes himself out from under the authority of his nuclear family, he doesn’t then decide to go it alone.

In the midst of challenging times, Jesus doesn’t give up on relationships,