† “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus begins Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina.
I don’t know if theirs had been a happy family in the Garden of Eden, our first parents Adam and Eve’s, but I expect that not long after Adam threw Eve under the apple cart before the Supreme Court Justice – was it over fruit or a flag? – they had their first marital fight. For certain, they were unhappy in their own way after Cain, their elder son, killed Abel, their younger, in a jealous rage, and covered up the crime-scene of the original murder.
Jesus’s family seems an unhappy one, too, at least by the evangelist Mark’s telling. Mark omits Jesus’s mother Mary by his side at a wedding, telling the waitstaff to do whatever he says. Mark leaves out Mary beneath the cross of her crucified-criminal son. Mark gives us no angels, no shepherds, no wise-men with their gift-boxes of impractical presents, no prophets and teachers in the temple who give Mary way too much to think about while this strange child grows up.
Rather, Mark has Mary and the rest of Jesus’s family paying attention to what people were posting on social media, that Jesus “has gone out of his mind,” and so they plan an intervention – like they’re on some low-budget cable-tv reality show – to shut him up and drag him home while he’s on-stage with the big-city elites, who accuse this hillbilly-mystic of being a devil-worshipper. Jesus returns the favor by snubbing his blood family who are off-stage calling for him, and adopting instead a chosen family from among the people sitting in the audience – “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Jesus said to a standing ovation. “Here are my mother and my brothers!”
“You get saved!” and “You get saved!” and “You get saved! … Everybody here gets saved!”
Yeah … that’s how it went.
I think it’s helpful that the gospel accounts don’t agree on the happiness of Jesus’s family. The tension and distance between Jesus and his blood-kin that Mark gives us provides a welcome ‘in’ for us modern readers who may have unhappy relations and disfunction with our own blood-families.
People often tell me about their family histories, their broken ties and burned bridges, how their biological family is no longer there for them for one reason or another – Tolstoy’s “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” rings true, even as there are similarities enough from one person’s story to the next.
San Francisco, I’ve learned is a destination city for people fleeing disfunction in their blood family in the hopes of finding something better in their chosen family: the people who get them, accept them, and are there for them; the people who don’t think that they’ve gone out of their minds – at least not too far out of their minds.
It's our city’s history of the adventure-seekers of the Barbary Coast, and the rhapsodic bohemians, and the hipsters of the left-coast Harlem Renaissance.
It's our city’s history of the Summer of Love and the mass-migration of flower-haired hippies leaving the squares and straights back home.
It’s our city’s history of gay liberation, where children who grew up knowing they were “different” finally found a place where they could be proud.
Maybe some of this is your own history.
Maybe it’s the history of someone you know who has adopted you as part of their chosen family.
Maybe you’ve reached out and reached back to blood-kin who have cut the family ties, only for them to ignore you when you ask them to come home.
There’s room in today’s gospel for you to try on several different pairs of sandals: Jesus’s own; his mother’s; his siblings’; his chosen family’s.
Which pair fits you best today?
Is there a pair you used to wear?
Is there a pair you hope to try on?
The good news in this hard gospel of insinuation and accusation is Jesus’s new, inclusive definition of family that goes beyond our blood and is bound up with his.
Note that, despite the tension between Jesus and his mother and his brothers, Jesus doesn’t exclude them out of hand. Rather, he invites his biological family; and he invites the listeners at his feet; and he invites us, his latter-day followers, into the immediacy and intimacy of his chosen family.
“Whoever does God’s will,” Jesus says, “is my brother and sister and mother.”
The other gospel writers tell us clearly that Mary indeed does God’s will. She consents to God’s invitation to bear and bring up the Savior of the World. She agrees to embrace all the happiness and endure all the unhappiness that singular task entails. She ponders the mysteries and she sweats the details.
When we do the will of God by consenting to God’s invitation to us; by resting in God’s desire for us; by showing up where Jesus is; by listening to what he has to say; and by following through by following him, Jesus places us on equal familial footing with Mary.
We become Jesus’ mother.
This won’t make our lives prelapsarian-perfect. Snakes-in-the-grass will show up and get the better of us. We will disappoint one another.
But God will always choose us, love us, and forgive us – before we even think to ask. Trusting in this, and doing the same for others, is the key to happiness. †
Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
3rd after Pentecost, Proper 5 – June 9, 2024
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
“When you’re here, you’re family”
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