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Is Jesus Rude?
Hello and welcome to Spend Five with Jesus. I am the Friar. This is Tuesday, September 26, 2023, and I am delighted to have you with us today.
The Gospel is a rather interesting Gospel, and we might think that Jesus is almost being rude when we look at the way in which he talks about his brothers and his mother in the Gospel because they’re out to see him. Now, we know that that these are relatives, his mother and his relatives that are really out to see him.
And we may be wondering, “Oh, why wouldn’t he want to see his mother? Why wouldn’t he want to see his relatives?” That’s a particularly good thing, right? We we go and visit our family. That would be something that would be really important for us, I think, to consider and to do. But the point is that what Jesus is getting at here is not really about family relationships at all.
It’s really about the most important relationship in any of our lives. So, Mary the mother of God, while she is the mother of Jesus and deserves respect as we know from the commandments that we see in the book of Deuteronomy and in the book of Exodus, that’s not really what makes her a phenomenally outstanding woman.
What makes her the phenomenally outstanding mother of God is because she is always and everywhere concerned about doing the will of God, about being open to the presence of God in her life, about doing the kinds of things that need to be done in order to really be faithful to God and to be faithful ultimately to her Divine Son for which she is the first disciple of the church.
And so it is just really important to underscore that. And that’s true for us as well. It’s not that we are connected to the right people. You know, you hear a lot in the job situation of networking and the importance of being in networks, and that certainly is a good thing for careers and providing a living for oneself and so forth.
But what’s more important is not that we know the right people or even though important people, it’s that we know Jesus. That we get to know Jesus in our life, that we get to know the Trinity, that we get to understand how it is that God is acting in our life and what it is that God is doing in our life and what is it that God wants us to do.
What does it mean to do the will of God in our lives? Then we learn all these things by being in a deep relationship with Jesus and being active in the church that he founded. And that’s really what’s important for us today is to see how those two things are the constant foundation that we should be thinking about in our life. How do we enter into a deeper and deeper relationship with Jesus, which is really about firstly responding to the grace that God gives us, the invitation that God gives us. That’s always primary.
And then what does that look like as we seek then to be active in the church that he founded, the Catholic Church. How do we find ourselves being really involved in the ways in which we should be involved in living out our faith through the church, going to Mass and celebrating the sacraments and spending time in prayer and caring for the needs of the poor and loving God, loving neighbor.
All of those kinds of things take place within the context of are seeing how it is that we can grow in this relationship. And that’s what Jesus is getting at in today’s readings. And so perhaps something to think about in your own life today is how is it that the relationship with Jesus is the most important relationship in your life?
It does not mean that what we would be thinking about or doing is to ignore the human beings in our life. In fact, if you’re married, your pathway to salvation, your vocation, is in fact through marriage. That’s how God has called you to be in this particular situation.
But how is God calling you to a deeper relationship with His Son? And then secondly, what is God calling you to do in love of neighbor? What is God calling you to do and being active in the church, celebrating the sacraments, maybe engaging in a Bible study, maybe doing some other type of thing that would help you to be active in the church, doing some other kind of ministry. So think about that today and be sure to join us again tomorrow.
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