A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
“He said to them in reply, ‘my mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and act upon it.’” (Lk 8:21)
Find today’s readings here.
I grew up in Omaha with two parents and six siblings, what is known in a certain parlance today as my “unchosen family.” I was born into this particular group of people, the Hoovers; I had no say in the matter.
When I was 30 I moved to St. Paul, joined the Jesuits and gained several more siblings—all brothers. This would be my “chosen family.” I decided to become a Jesuit and take on these new brothers.
But while the Jesuits, as a whole, were my chosen family, not all of the actual individual Jesuits I have ever lived with were necessarily “chosen.” Whether in a one-story yellow novitiate in St. Paul, a converted apartment building in Chicago or an old brick mission in South Dakota, the Jesuits I resided with were not a multi-generational friend group I pre-selected as roommates. They were not a bunch of guys from my college lax team who decided to rent a house together. (I did not play lax.) Rather, these were men from anywhere who converged upon one place–St. Paul, Chicago, Pine Ridge—because they had all felt called to the Society of Jesus.
When Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke that his family is “those who hear the word of God and act upon it,” he is not shutting out of his life his unchosen biological family. He is in fact widening the scope of his family.
Jesus is moving his deepest and closest relationships beyond mere kinship ties into something wider and more profound. Jesus is, in effect, destroying false and human divisions and saying that anyone can be on God’s side. It is a choice, not a birthright. He is , in essence, creating the same metaphysical reality that Paul would later write about in Galatians:
“All of you who have been baptized with Christ have clothed yourself with him. There does not exist among you Jew or Greek, slave or freemen, male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus.”
Jesus does not push his mother and brothers out; he brings others into their world. What could seem to be a painful denial—“my mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God”—is actually a poignant gesture of inclusion.
My life, as a religious who has chosen to live with people he did not choose to live with, underlines this idea that we are all brothers and sisters. Even though we Jesuits live geographically intimate lives—sharing meals, conversation, prayer, a roof—our most profound intimate relationship is with someone else. It is with Christ Jesus. We all believe in Christ as the way, the truth and the life. We believe in him as someone worth the risks and unknown consequences of going back to an unchosen family. And it is, in fact, worth it, living again in an unchosen family, because it is where God is. Nothing more, nothing less.
And in the end, there actually is no “unchosen” family. God has chosen us to be with the people we are with. Our job is to find out why; to dig up the (sometimes buried) treasure of those relationships, and uncover what God is doing through them. Who are my brothers and mother? Whoever I am with.
