Always keep ahold of nurse

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 19-21) gives us once more the scene in which Jesus’ mother and relatives arrive to see Him but cannot gain access. When He is told they are there to see Him, He announces that His mother and cousins – called here brothers and sisters by Jewish custom - are those who hear God’s word and do it.

The obvious lessons of this passage are easily grasped and are a constant consolation to us. If obedience to God makes us the near relative of Christ, we can be sure of two things. First, nobody was closer or more pleasing to God than Mary who by her obedient fiat at the Annunciation counterbalanced in a sense the disobedience of Eve. This was the second chapter of her role in the restauration of humanity and made the way for Jesus’ own supreme and triumphal actions by which she was saved and, with her, those who do the will of God. The second thing we can be sure of is that this obedience of which Jesus speaks is at the heart of our conformity to Him through whom we become the adopted children of the Most High. Baptism in His death and resurrection is only the beginning of that conformity, which is meant to break forth in a glorious growth and flourishing by our transformation in Him. Thus, like all relatives, our kinship is signalled by our very likenesses. This is how they will know we are Christians: by our love for one another, for the obedience of the Lord makes us like the One who is Love Divine, all loves excelling.

Yet, these are not the end of the lessons in today’s gospel. On earth Jesus was content to appear a man and even tolerated the judgements – let us say the misjudgements - of the crowd as part of His earthly state. Thus, we can quite imagine that some of the onlookers in this scene, hearing or seeing that He did not instantly welcome the arrival of His mother and relatives, might easily have assumed He felt about them as we often feel about our own relatives. On a quiet country road near where your blogger lives, one sign proudly hangs at a front gate: Relatives by appointment only. Seeing a man dodge his nearest and dearest is practically a joke because it is so very understandable, and so very unlike the customary honour we rightly pay parents and family, the former by ordinance of the Most High.

But if the crowd would have been wrong to judge Jesus thus, the truth remains that, as everyone knows, our families can sometimes hurt and wound us in ways that nobody else can. Jesus came for this too. In humanity’s severed branches and crooked timber, the wounds of those who are meant to be our dear ones can be savage, probably because they go back to our earliest days. These wounds are manifest in us through those parts of the inner man that withdraw and hide away, caught as it were in an ancient amber of the soul that has immobilised them, making them less sensitive to pain perhaps, but also less apt for healing. These wounds are protected by other inner guardians, the defensive behaviours that experience claims can protect our deepest, most damaged selves.

And all the while, as in all damaged conditions, we are not free to respond to God’s love in the fullest sense of our fiat, and we do not love others as we are called to love them. Parents can wound us through breaching the unwritten and yet deeply intuited contract binding their state in life and ours. These wounds we are capable of carrying forward into our relationship with God who, we struggle to learn, is not as imperfect in His parenting as they were. Yet, siblings can wound us also. Many years ago, I visited the Royal Courts of Justice in London and entered a public gallery during a civil case that I chose merely at random. The theatre was extraordinary. Two brothers were suing each other, angry and relentless in a mutual persecution over a disputed heritage. These two had stopped opening the door to each other some time before, and I was hardly surprised by a later newspaper report explaining that their dispute had helped eat up much of the disputed estate in legal costs.

Because that is what all wounds do: they consume us from the inside. At worst, they become infected and suppurate, poisoning the system. Perhaps more commonly, they recondition the heart, blocking the arteries of love. They change and chill our behaviour to those who should love best. We hug them less closely; we leave their calls unanswered. We act to protect ourselves, and all the while we fail the vocation of love.

For the vocation of love, our obedience to the Father, would call us to be present, even in our discomfort. Contradicting every instinct to protect an old wound from further damage and pain, we are called to renounce the malign spirit that drives us to withdraw. In that moment, we must enter the mystery of Christ by enduring the presence of the people and the things that most seem to threaten us, for in the end, our safety always did lie in God who is our harbour and haven.

Our mothers, brothers and sisters stand without; it could of course be much, much worse, as it is for our persecuted Chinese or Nigerian brothers and sisters. But then whatever stands without, we are called to give our fiat to embracing whatever and whomever the Lord asks us to be present to today.

And in being thus present, in refusing to anesthetise ourselves to their very resonance, we will be walking the path of obedience to our Father in heaven and taking on more and more the likeness of our Brother who came to save us all.