TRANSLATION MATTHEW 12: 46

He was still speaking to the crowd when –see this!- his mother and his brothers stood outside wanting to speak with him. Some one said to him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside wanting to speak with you.” Jesus replied to the speaker, “Who is my mother? And who are my brothers?” And reaching out his hand towards his pupils, he said, “See this!-Here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my father in heaven, that one is my brother and my sister and my mother.”

Here we see demonstrated the connection in Matthew’s narrative between Jesus’ actual social and political insignificance and his magical status as Son of God: his inhuman decisiveness. These are the words of a moral terrorist, leaving no scope for argument, no space for everything that human society holds dear. In comparison with the cause of God, they are nothing. Before we approve his teaching as evidence of Jesus’ faith, we should note their closeness to the ethic of Islamic Jihad, whose most extreme inhumanities are accompanied by the assertion that Allah is great.

Of course, we want to say, Jesus is not offering any violence, but rather accepting the sacrifice of his most precious relationships for the sake of his mission. Tell that to the mother, sisters and brothers left standing outside. Are his words not a violent rejection of them? Are they not hurt and diminished?

On the other hand, followers of Jesus might ask themselves how often family commitment has prevented them doing what they thought was the will of God. In Matthew’s presentation, Jesus refuses to belong to anyone other than his father in heaven and the people to whom his father has sent him. (Notice that the female parent is here rejected while the masculine super-parent is affirmed.)

We might want simply to leave this difficult incident and move to other easier events in Matthew’s gospel, but the author knew that as he fed us with his story of Jesus, this event would stick in our craw.