If he were here today, I feel reasonably sure that Jesus would be called a radical, a zealot, an extremist, if you will. He never hurt anyone, but he certainly didn’t “pull his punches” or “mince” his words.
My sense is that Jesus was focused on one thing: Reestablishing his kingdom so that he could glorify God. Jesus spoke some difficult words, he said some difficult things to anyone that stood against that goal.
For example… One day, as Jesus was traveling from village to village, his mother and brothers came to find him, presumably to take him away from what he was doing and to take him home. John tells us that his brothers didn’t believe in him in the early part of his ministry, so my sense is that they wanted to intervene, to bring his work to an end, to take him home so as to end the focus and embarrassment that had come on their family because of the crowds that were following Jesus’s ministry work.
But his mother and his brothers remained outside. They stood outside the house where Jesus was teaching. They didn’t go in, so as Jesus was told that they had arrived, Jesus responded directly to the person who came to tell him that they were there:
“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.”
Matthew 12:48-49
Can you imagine? Even in a culture that doesn’t practice the closeness of familial ties, this would be an incredible rebuke, a slap in the faces of his family we might even say. What would the person go back out to tell his mother and brothers? “Sorry, Jesus says that his family are those that are inside listening to him… Not sure what that means for all of you…”
But this IS a culture that practiced those familial ties. In their culture, the family stayed together. The family worked together. The family even lived together even in the same house or houses, and here is Jesus saying, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”.
He isn’t disowning them. No, they have denied him. They have denied his identity and their hope is to take him home and return back to the way it was before. They thought that he was out of mind. They thought that it was time to end this madness, this delusion that Jesus was living within. No, everyone was supposed to be at home. Everyone should be quiet. Everyone should be doing what they were supposed to be doing, contributing to the family and living in the way that they were supposed to be living, according to the way a good Jewish boy should be living.
However, Jesus didn’t see it this way. He responded to the person who had told him that his family had arrived by looking at his disciples and those with him there in the house and essentially saying, “This is my family.” Those that are doing the will of God, those that are listening to me, these are my family members.
How often do we get swept up into our cultural norms, into thinking in the way that our culture thinks instead of thinking with a focus on the kingdom of God? All of the time! I can say that it required me moving outside of my own culture to be able to see it with more clarity. In fact, I had many places where I was blind to see my own self in the light of the kingdom of God because the culture in which I had grown up was my dominant perspective. In many ways, it probably still is, and probably still prevents me from seeing how the kingdom of God is working all around me.
This is our challenge. We need to continue to remain in Christ, abiding in him and walking with him to such an extent that we can see with greater clarity the priorities of the kingdom of God over the priorities of the world around us. From there, once I understand those priorities and see them with that level of clarity, I must then reorient my actions so as to organize my life based on what Jesus wants and is doing over those things that I want, or those things that the culture tells me that I should want. This is the question that I should ask myself on a daily basis: How can I do all of that?
Jesus spoke directly, and at times with difficult and challenging words, so as to help people see clearly and wake them from their sleep that had come on related to the culture that would lie to them about the priorities of life. May we also be a people that sees clearly the priorities of Christ and that of his kingdom.