"Then [Jesus'] mother and brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.' And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers!' Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother'." [Mark 3:31-35]
At the very beginning, the followers of Jesus were a pretty motley crew.
The gospels indicate that Jesus' hand-picked crew of disciples ran the gamut from Roman-collaborating tax collectors like Matthew to Rome-hating Zealot Simon. His circle of close friends included women and men, educated and uneducated, old and young. He apparently drew followers from Galilee in the north, Judah in the south, and eventually foreigners from other countries who wanted "to see Jesus" (see John 12).
After the resurrection, the diversity exploded exponentially. Within a span of a few years, a handful of Jewish peasants had become a gathering of Judeans, Samaritans, and Gentiles, including people from every walk of life and career path, every income level, every social class, and every kind of family arrangement you could imagine. They did not hold a single common language, nationality, culture, or set of customs, nor did they all have the same story of how they came to be Christians. They did not share a common ancestry, DNA, or the same set of physical characteristics, and they did not share the same political allegiances, other than to say they confessed Jesus as Lord over all human kings, queens, emperors, and senates.
In fact, by the second century (maybe circa AD 150, give or take), a Christian writer could say this about the followers of Jesus:
"Christians are indistinguishable from other men
either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities
of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life.... With regard to
dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever
city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
"And yet there is something extraordinary about their
lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing
through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the
disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their
homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and
have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not
their wives.
"They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by
the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens
of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the
law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they
are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live
in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an
abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are
defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their
response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of
malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life."
The anonymous writer of this treatise, now simply called "To Diognetus," says that what bound the followers of Jesus together was not their DNA, their language, their skin color, or their ethnicity, but a way of life grounded in the love of God and the character of Jesus.
From the beginning, then, the community of Jesus' followers has been a sort of "found family." That is to say, the church was made of up people who often were treated as outsiders, pariahs, and unacceptable by their family and kinfolk, and instead they found in the community of Jesus a welcome that called them beloved. And from there, they were changed by that love. They were caught up in doing the will of God--in loving those who had hated them, responding to abuse and threats with blessing, and being kind in response to disrespect. They did not put their own group first, and they did not make language or culture or nationality a condition for belonging--they could not, after all, because they had already come from different tribes and kingdoms and languages.
And to hear Jesus tell it, even from his own lifetime and relationship with his biological family, he had always intended to create a community that was wider that the bounds of biology. Family itself gets redefined in Jesus--it is no longer simply a matter of people with whom you share a certain number of genetic traits, but a community bound up in love and the will of God. "Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother," Jesus says. That isn't meant as a slight to his mother and siblings per se (although they had been rather aloof with him earlier in the same passage from Mark's gospel, and seem to be a little bit embarrassed by him), but rather it is meant to lift all people up into the same closeness as family. Note--Jesus doesn't just invite people to be his "friends." He doesn't say, "Whoever does the will of God is my friend, or my colleague, or my co-worker." Those kinds of relationships, however important in life, are temporal and conditional. But family is the kind of thing that is permanent--you are "stuck" in your family and with your family, and your belonging is not dependent on whether you like or don't like each other. You are brothers and sisters, parents and children, no matter what. Now, what we do with those relationships--whether we nurture them or let them wither on the vine--is a separate issue. But unlike friendship, which can be broken apart by distance, indifference, mistrust, or replacement (it happens), family is a permanent sort of belonging. And Jesus has just granted it to anybody, regardless of their DNA or background.
To belong in the family of Jesus is simply to be swept up in the way and will and love of God. The community of Jesus-the family of Jesus, as it were--was meant, from its very inception, then, to be a safe place for people in search of a "found family" who would welcome them regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, or what language they spoke. That simply is what the church is meant to be; Jesus, being the center of this family, gets to decide that.
All these centuries later, sometimes I fear we have forgotten that Jesus is the one who gets to make such decisions--and that Jesus has set the policy to include anybodies and everybody from every nation, language, culture, and background. We have added our own infectious heresy (and that is what it is) that being a Christian brings with it a commitment to a particular nation, or language, or culture, or custom. We treat the word "Christian" like it is a matter of having a certain kind of DNA, or a certain appreciation for "our" style of music, or that advances "my group's interests" first. But this is not how Jesus spoke and acted--he has created a new kind of community, a found family, in which we discover we are already beloved regardless of where we have come from. And there is room--more than enough room--in this found family, for us and our children together, for our neighbors and for strangers, for people from right next door and from people halfway around the world. Jesus' family includes people whom I like and who like me, and people with whom I strongly disagree or would perceive as my "enemy" if I only saw things in terms of national identity. Jesus has found us all, and it is his claim that makes us belong.
And that mission--of being the place where anybody can be part of the family--is why we keep doing what we do. For all the other ways that we get bogged down in the tediousness of The Business of Organized Religion--budgets and office work and conventions and conferences and committees and property maintenance and all the rest--we are here to be a gathering point for the family of Jesus, which brings people from everywhere and sweeps us up in the love of God.
It is, then, exactly what you would expect that the followers of Jesus should be a pretty motley crew. It is a sign that Jesus means what he says as he grabs us all by the hand and calls us family.
We are indeed a "found" family--Jesus has found each one of us.
Dear Jesus, thank you for claiming us to belong in your family. Grant us the vision and love to extend that same welcome to all peoples, languages, and cultures today.
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