There was a lot of discussion about who was identified as neighbor in Jesus’ day. With a lot of discussion about immigration policies, with a lot of anger and division present in our country, the definition of neighbor is a foremost topic of discussion in our modern society as well. In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks a similar question: Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? We can say that we belong to someone, that we belong to specific family or kinship group, 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 and his other extended family members. 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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