Advent Part 22: Mary and Jesus’s brothers and sisters.
Matthew 12:46-50 (NLT)
46 As Jesus was speaking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. 47 Someone told Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, and they want to speak to you.”
48 Jesus asked, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” 49 Then he pointed to his disciples and said, “Look, these are my mother and brothers. 50 Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother!”
Dear God,
This is really a combination story with Matthew 13, but I want to start with just this part. The order of the stories is that Jesus dissed Mary and his brothers here, then he tells a bunch of parables by the sea, and then he goes into the synagogue and is rejected (and indicates his family has rejected him as well).
What a strange time this must have been for Mary. She apparently had a lot of children, both boys and girls. I wonder how much time she spent trying to calm the other children down as they dealt with Jesus as their brother. It had to have been hard for them, and it added an underappreciated layer of complexity to Mary’s life as a mother. Maybe it would have been easier for her to figure out how to be a mother to Jesus as an adult if he had been her only child, but she had other children to worry about as well. She was a mother to all of them. And I am sure sometimes she did it right by standing up to them and telling them they were wrong about Jesus, and sometimes she did it wrong and gave in to their perspective of him.
Being a parent, even of adult children, is so complicated. It is true that our job to parent them is never quite over. As long as we are alive, there is a role for us to play, even if it is only to show them love. Then there are the decisions we must make regarding whether to help them or not help them in a given situation. I hate to see them suffer, but I also do not want to get in the way of how you might be working in their lives through an obstacle in front of them. If I remove that obstacle, have I gotten in your way?
Father, thank you that our forebears were just people too. Thank you for giving us examples of flawed people who were as lost in their parenting as I feel sometimes. I would learn nothing if they were perfect, but none of them were. Please help my wife and me to parent our children. Counsel us through each other and through others. Raise up people in our children’s lives whom they can hear and will speak with your voice. Heal their wounds. Heal our wounds. And in the end, may our lives glorify you.
I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,
Amen
