Jesus’ Conditions for “Kinship in the Kingdom”
Jesus’ unique experience of God as “abba” led him to reveal God as “abba” to others. Jesus experienced God not only as intimately present to him, but as the compassionate generous, forgiving, merciful One seeking to bring all into a new family, but especially the poor, the despised, the outcasts. In accounting the reign of God on earth, the institution of a new family of God’s children, Jesus did not deny the value of blood ties. He urged the observance of the fourth commandment to honor one’s faith and one’s mother. Indeed, Jesus’ personal appreciation of the richness of family life probably inspired in part his use of family images to describe membership in the kingdom of God. At the same time Jesus found it necessary to utter some “hard sayings” about the limitations of human kinship in relationship to “kinship in the kingdom.”
Jesus taught that kinship with him did not provide the key for entrance into the kingdom, but rather doing the will of God. When a woman cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” (Lk 11:27), Jesus replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.!” (Lk 11:28). Again, Jesus taught: “Call no man father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Mt 23:9), and “you have one teacher, and you are all [brothers and sisters]” (Mt 23:8). Even if Jesus is here referring to the use of professional titles the deeper implication is that obedience to God is primary and that all human commitments are to be measured in the light of commitment to God. Jesus taught in an uncompromising way that certain attachments to kin could even block entry into the kingdom of God. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters . . . . he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).
Jesus did not exclude his relatives from the kingdom, but, as with all others, he called them to undergo a conversion, to humble themselves, to enter into the kingdom of God and to accept as equals in the kingdom the poor, the outcasts, the tax collectors, the prostitutes. Jesus asked his brothers and sisters in the flesh to make a basic option, to choose for him and his message rather than against him Jesus was speaking of the need to confront this option when he said that he had come not to bring peace, but a sword, “to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother” (Mt 10:34-35). Jesus called everyone to “face the sword of deciding,” the “sword that divides the believer from the non-believer.” The fruit of a positive decision is entrance into a new family, the “kinship of the kingdom” in which all are equals as children of God and brothers and sisters of Jesus.
In sum, then, what kind of a brother was Jesus to his brother and sisters by blood? He was a brother who loved his own family enough to invite them to share in the deepest secrets of his heart, to discover his beloved “abba” as their own “abba,” to enter into the kingdom of the “abba.” Jesus did not disavow his brothers and sisters in the flesh, but he asked them to look beyond the narrow confines of kinship and to become members of a new, universal family. The love of blood relatives for one another in this new family is not extinguished or diminished but deepened. And everyone who enters into the new family of the kingdom of God acquires a whole multitude of new brothers and sisters as well. (Bernard J. Tyrrell, Christointegretation: The Transforming Love of Jesus Christ [New York: Paulist Press, 1989], 78-79)