A
week ago in our Sunday Gospel, with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the
topic of discussion was identifying our neighbor. There
was a lot of discussion about who was identified as neighbor in Jesus’
day. It appears that with the violence,
anger, and demonstrations that are erupting in a lot of communities across the
US, the definition of neighbor is a foremost topic of discussion in our modern
society as well. In
today’s Gospel, Jesus asks: Who is my mother?
Who are my brothers? We
can say that we belong to someone, but do our actions and our words match with
what we believe?
When
Jesus’ was pointing to his disciples, saying that they were his brothers and
his mother, I don’t think that Jesus was lessening the importance of his mother Mary and his earthly father Joseph. As
Christ says elsewhere in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, “Whoever does the will of God is
my brother and sister and mother". The
family of our Lord Jesus Christ is eternal. It is a
family that he gathers to himself. It is a
family that we are a part of as his disciples. He
welcomes us to his family to do his will because that is our destiny in our
discipleship in Christ. To be
faithful to our vocation as disciples, to be faithful to our purpose in life,
we are to fulfill the hopes and dreams that God has in store for us. And
as a member of Christ’s family, we are called to holiness, we are called to
strive toward perfection. It is a
perfection that we will never achieve, but we are to strive toward it and to do
our best. At the
end of our days, may Christ be able to say to us: “Come, you that are blessed
by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the
world."
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