Who are my mother and brothers?

I come from a traditional family.   My parents have been married for forty years.  My grandparents were married for longer.   The only step anything I have are nieces/nephews, and one cousin, who I do not call my step cousin, just my cousin.  I have seen--and benefited from--effects of a traditional two parent home.   I know what it means to belong without actually fitting in to a family.   I have also noticed that the older I get the more I realize how absolutely blessed I am to have been born to these people.   We have our problems, same as everybody else, but at the core of it we still love each other and when it hits the fan, we back each other up. 

I'm convinced that's what makes my family functional.   Functional in the sense  that at the moment everyone is speaking to everyone else and that we're all part of each other's lives.   Today's gospel reading made me think today that maybe Jesus' family was functional in the same way.   They may have thought he was nuts, but in the end, especially in the end, they showed up anyway.   Jesus, likewise, seems annoyed but uses the moment to make a point:

  Mark 3:31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.
3:32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you."
3:33 And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?"
3:34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!
3:35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

Notice that the ties that bind could not have possibly been severed completely because we have his brother James showing up in the Book of Acts at the Council of Jerusalem and his mother follows him to the cross.  No one is throwing anyone away here.    He's just widening the circle.  Widening the circle big time.

I once had the big brass lady balls to say at church that my family never shows up and I have no one to spend Midnight Mass with.   I was immediately corrected.   I say big brass lady balls because those people have been putting up with me since I was 15 years old.   I should know by now that those people are my family.   Put a qualifier of church family on it if you must, at this point, I think we're stuck with each other.

There's more than one way to be family.   I saw La Cage aux Folles Friday night with my good friend and her fiance and saw that played out on the stage.  The crazy maid, the straight son, the drag queen mother, and the father trying to play referee between his son's desire to get past his future in-laws and his partner's need for recognition for his role in raising the boy.   What makes a family?  Is it children?  Long suffering each other's company?  Who was more of a mother?  We didn't see much of her, but I think Ann's mother was more interested in keeping that corn cob in its place than in making her daughter happy.  I think in that family it was the mother.  He wasn't just his father's partner, he was the one who turned their house into a home.  That deserved respect.   Jean Michael deserved respect too.  He turned out different than his parents without turning his back on them, and dealt with all the trauma and drama that comes from the way people reacted to his family when he was growing up.  

There's more to raising kids and living right than being in a traditional relationship and having the equipment to produce offspring.  I know families that are incredibly dysfunctional that are not broken homes in the sense that the parents are divorced.  They are broken in the sense that the love just isn't there.   The father tries to kill the daughter and no one, especially not the mother, calls the cops.  The daughter doesn't think she has any business getting angry about not being protected.  It's just broken.  Never mind that there's not a divorce decree involved, that family is broken.

So what makes a family?  Blood?  Affection?  In the case of Jesus, whoever does the will of God?

Getting hung up on the rules.

'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

I'm going to start this out by saying that I like me some human precepts. Don't get me wrong. I'm not negating what Jesus was pointing out when he quoted this passage. These human precepts are way less important than people. Making sure your parents are taken care of is more important than washing your hands. Or um, say, bowing when the cross goes by. Or bowing/genuflecting when you pass in front of the alter.

It's just that even with my attachment to some trappings of worship I've never noticed what he was accusing them of in this passage. I have no way to look it to see if this was actually going on. I wouldn't even know where to begin to research this. It says:

But you say that whoever tells father or mother, 'Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,' then that person need not honor the father. 6 So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm reading this right. What I'm seeing (will someone please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the religious leaders of the day had decided it was acceptable to neglect your elderly parents if the money/food/shelter you would have given them is given instead to the temple or synagogue. This was a world without Social Security, investment portfolios and nursing homes so I'm taking a wild guess that families took care of their own old people.

I'm back to square one on this. They were telling people what? How hard up would you have to be to take money meant for the care of someone's elderly parents? And then they had the nerve to point out someone didn't wash their hands?

As an aside, I'm all about hand washing. Really. Seriously. Very important. I keep soap by every sink in my house. But pointing out someone didn't wash their hands (and to their rabbi no less instead of to them---all grown men) when you're running around giving people ideas for ways to be spiritually pure and still throw their cranky elderly mother out into the street so you can get some extra nice priestly knickers?

Come on.

It actually reminds me of some modern Christians. I'm not going into specifics but some people just don't have their priorities straight. How can you say you love God when you obviously hate your neighbor? If you encourage people to neglect their families to take care of the Church, you don't get it. If you value appearances more than people you don't get it. If you spend all your time worrying about sex when people are freezing to death outside your door you don't get it. For that matter, if you tell a woman she should just die if it isn't safe to carry her baby to term, you don't get it. (If you excommunicate the poor nun who decided that saving one life was better than losing too, you're probably going to roast in hell or at least do some hard time in purgatory.)

God loves us. He occasionally asks us to do something--or not do something--and it's almost always because he loves us. It's not because he's a nitpicking evil god who makes arbitrary rules so he can squash us like bugs on the radiator of a car the second we screw up. It's because people get hurt when they don't do those things right. I could describe it all, but it would be silly. We all know sin damages the sinner. It all hurts. It hurts us. If we remember that he wants these things for us because he loves us and not so he can love us like he doesn't already we'll get it.