A CROWD HAD gathered in the house where Jesus was teaching. As sometimes happened when he was deeply engaged in ministry, Jesus kept going right through lunch, so that he and his disciples didn’t have time to eat. When his family heard about it (which, frankly, leaves me wondering how they heard about it and from whom), they shook their heads at his lack of common sense and went to take charge of the situation. When they got there, Mary and her other sons sent someone into the house to announce that they were waiting outside. Apparently, this was said loudly enough for others to hear.

Jesus, however, didn’t immediately jump up and say, “Sorry, everyone, but I have to go,” as one might have expected a well-mannered and obedient Jewish boy to do when his mother called. Instead, he used the message as yet another teaching opportunity. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked the people seated around him. And with a sweep of his hands, he answered his own question: “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-34, NIV).

Jesus, of course, was not dissing his mother. But he was redefining family, reordering the priorities taken for granted by his listeners. A new loyalty was being established: those who did the will of God would be family to one another.

And let me add a side note: when Jesus says that those who do God’s will are his “brother and sister and mother,” the Greek text actually has the word “sister.” Elsewhere in the New Testament, to be more inclusive, contemporary English translations often insert the word “sister” where only the word “brother” is used. That’s a good thing because, often, when the biblical writers say only “brothers,” they are following their own cultural conventions and are not intending to exclude women. For Jesus to say “sister,” therefore, is important in a culture that downplayed the role and status of women, as our own culture often still does. As the apostle Paul would later insist, the new family of God would include men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile (Gal 3:28). Old social distinctions would be broken down in the new family that would come to be known as the church.

GOOGLE THE PHRASE “church family,” and you’ll get thousands of hits. Some will link you to church websites, touting the core values of a congregation or announcing a sermon series on family. Some will take you to blog posts telling you why it’s right and beautiful to think of the church as a family, and others telling you why it’s wrong and dangerous. Simply put, the danger comes from letting the cultural assumptions and expectations we already have about family life define our expectations for the church — assumptions about roles and hierarchies, for example, or about who’s in and who’s out. Jesus didn’t do that, and neither should we.

Having said that, the apostles themselves clearly use family language to talk about the community of believers. Here again, for example, is what John says at the beginning of 1 John 5:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. (1 John 5:1, NIV)

Previously, we’ve seen the importance of that little phrase, “Jesus is the Christ.” For John, the title “Christ” is not just another name for Jesus; it carries decades of accumulated wisdom about the true identity of Jesus. To believe that Jesus is the Christ means more than believing that he merely existed or was a good man or a brilliant teacher or even the Messiah, the anointed king from the line of David. It means believing that he was the Son of God, the eternal Word made flesh.

Moreover, John says, those who believe that Jesus is the Christ are “born of God.” This is language he’s used before. Jesus himself was born of God (John 1:13), and told Nicodemus that anyone who wanted to enter God’s kingdom had to be born again, through baptism and the Holy Spirit (John 3:3,5). And we’ve seen how in his letter John declares that those who are born of God don’t sin habitually (1 John 3:9), and obey Jesus’ command to his disciples that they must love one another (1 John 4:7).

Here at the beginning of chapter 5, he seems to lean into the familial implications of all this. To be born of God is to be a child of God, he seems to say to his readers. Everyone who, like you, truly believes that Jesus is the Christ is therefore also born of God, a child of the same Father. And come on, what child wouldn’t love this Father? So if you love the Father, you should also love all his children. It goes with the territory. We’re family.

I know that for many of us, the language of family is a bit fraught, especially if we haven’t grown up in a loving environment. We come to church hoping to find a real family, a truly welcoming and loving group of people in which we can be known, accepted, and free to grow.

And then the drama happens. First, people disagree. Then they fight. And sometimes, they leave. What happened to loving one another? Was it all just show? Will we ever find the family we seek?

John was not, I think, a pie-in-the-sky optimist. He was, however, someone who took the command of Jesus seriously, and wanted his readers to do the same. Loving one another isn’t always easy, but it’s the will of God. And as we’ll see, when our attempts at love don’t achieve the results for which we hoped, we may have to settle for knowing we did the right thing.