Mt 12,46-50 – Tuesday of the XVI Week of Ordinary Time
An almost occasional gesture becomes an opportunity for Jesus to teach us a great lesson. While he is speaking to the crowd, his mother and relatives try to meet him. Someone points it out to him, but Jesus responds with words that, at first glance, might almost seem like a rudeness: “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?”. Then, pointing to his disciples, he adds: «Whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven is my brother, sister and mother».
In reality, Jesus is not distancing himself from his mother. On the contrary, he is saying something that Maria herself experienced before and better than anyone else. Mary belongs to Christ not only because she generated him in the flesh, but because she made the will of God the center of her existence. His “Here I am” is the highest form of this belonging. The good news of today’s Gospel is therefore extraordinary. We can be born two thousand years after Jesus, live on the other side of the world, speak another language and not belong to his people according to the flesh, yet we can become his family.
Familiarity with Christ does not depend on geographical or temporal distance, but on the willingness to do the Father’s will. This also means that one is not a Christian simply because of a label, a tradition received or a declaration of belonging. Christianity is measured in the concreteness of choices. We can say many words about God and live as if God does not exist. And we can meet people who perhaps do not have our religious language, and who we imagine as distant, but who through the good they choose, the truth they seek and the love they practice provoke us profoundly because in fact they are more Christian than us.
