10th Sunday of Ordinary Time
After the great feasts of Pentecost, Holy Trinity ,Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart we now go back to Ordinary Time. The themes for the 10th Sunday include sin and redemption, God’s mercy and justice, hope and faith, the power of God’s Word, the challenges of discipleship, and the concept of the spiritual family. In the First Reading from Genesis God confronts Adam and Eve after they eat from the forbidden tree. They blame each other and the serpent, who is then cursed by God. Then in the Second Reading from Corinthians Saint Paul; tells us We speak from faith, confident that as God raised Jesus, He will also raise us. Despite physical decline, our spirits are renewed, with a focus on eternal, unseen glory.Our Gospel story for this Sunday is all about the Family of Jesus and their attempt to take control of him. When Jesus asks the question who is my Mother and my brothers he puts everything in its place. In one move, Jesus replaced his personal family and friends with the family of God the Church and that is the people who did the will of God, his Father. Jesus is not disowning his family; he is acknowledging the relationship between himself and the Father and that bond is greater than the physical bond of family and homeplace.
Jesus establishes a new family, no doubt hoping that his own relatives, like everyone else, will come to accept him for who he is the son of God our saviour. Clearly his relatives like so many others have trouble accepting the change that Jesus has undergone from becoming a village carpenter to a mighty prophet who proclaims the kingdom of God his Father. Jesus has to face that misunderstanding and rejection. It is part of the cross he has to bear. Allegiance to the Father and by implication to his Son transcended ties of the country you come from and the family you belonged to. The Kingdom of God was above any social structure. Hence, social expectations over behaviour, even behaviour that challenged the status quo of the leaders, was also superseded. Family ties, social roles, and religious pecking orders were meaningless. Their problem, and ours lies in the expectations we have. What do we expect others to do? What do we expect God to do? How do we react when God or others don’t meet our expectations? More important, how do we react when God or others CHALLENGE our expectations? These days there are many different challenges to us as members of god’s family I believe that faith will prevail but the faith of the future will be different but in many ways will remain the same. The gospels are always challenging and calling us to a better way of life as members of the body of Christ his family.
We will become his brothers and sisters if we do the will of God. Doing the will of God may alienate us from our family and all the people we know and the things we cherish, but Jesus always points us towards a more important relationship the relationship we have through faith with the Father. As we go forward there will be many challenges to us in our personal lives and our lives of faith. If we are true to the faith we profess each time we say the creed then we can say that we are the brothers and sisters of Jesus doing the will of the father as we face the challenges of being people of faith wherever we live in the world.
Fullerton T 