JESUS, AS USUAL, was speaking to a crowd. He had already earned the resentment of the Pharisees by allowing his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath, then made them even angrier by healing a man on the Sabbath as well, in the synagogue, right under their noses. As the Pharisees began to scheme together how they might kill him (I guess it was okay to plot murder on the Sabbath!), Jesus left that place and continued to heal and teach the crowd that followed.

At some point, Jesus entered a house; it’s not clear from Matthew’s narrative when this happened. I imagine the house being packed with people who were hanging on his every word. While he was teaching, someone told him that his mother and brothers were outside waiting to speak with him. We don’t know why they wanted to talk to him. But given the cultural norms of the day, they probably expected him to stop what he was doing and excuse himself temporarily to see to his family. Nobody would have thought less of him for doing so.

Jesus’ response to the man who had brought him the message, however, must have surprised everyone: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Answering his own question, he turned and pointed to his disciples, saying, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt 12:49-50, NIV).

Matthew doesn’t say, but I doubt that Jesus left his mother standing outside for long. Perhaps he told the man, “Go tell her I’ll be there in a few minutes.” He wouldn’t have wanted the crowd to think that he was disrespecting his family or didn’t care about them. Indeed, the poignant scene of how Jesus later provided for Mary’s care even as he hung dying on the cross should give the lie to that idea (John 19:25-27).

But the teaching opportunity was too good to pass up. Those who faithfully did his Father’s will would be his brothers and sisters; together, under one Father, they would become a new spiritual family. And the point of his teaching the lesson in that way, making Mary and his brothers wait, is that this new family would challenge other loyalties that would otherwise be taken for granted.

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THE APOSTLE PAUL teaches a similar lesson to the Colossians. Here are his words, this time as translated in the Common English Bible:

Don’t lie to each other. Take off the old human nature with its practices and put on the new nature, which is renewed in knowledge by conforming to the image of the one who created it. In this image there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all things and in all people. (Col 3:9-11)

The CEB translates Paul as referring to the “old human nature” and the “new nature” as opposed to the New International Version’s “old self” and “new self” — and to me, that’s an appropriate move. In modern western culture, the word “self” carries too much baggage, suggesting a kind of individualism foreign to the world of the Bible. What Paul tells the Colossians, literally, is that they’ve already stripped off the “old human being” and put on the new, and the idea of a shared human nature captures this nicely.

That new nature, though, hasn’t finished developing yet; it’s being “renewed.” That verb is only used one other time in the New Testament, where Paul tells the Corinthians that “even if our bodies are breaking down on the outside, the person that we are on the inside is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16, CEB). We have been made new, but we are also works in progress, being made more and more in the image of Christ.

And in this image, in this new humanity, the old social and ethnic distinctions are broken down. Paul says something similar in his letter to the Galatians:

All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:27-28, CEB)

In both passages, Paul mentions the distinction between Jew and Greek, but in Colossians, Paul takes it further. On the one hand, from a Jewish standpoint, that distinction could point to the disdain Jews had for Gentiles. In Colossians, that division is further reinforced by the reference to circumcision versus uncircumcision.

On the other hand, from the other side, the distinction points to the disdain those of Greek culture had for, well, just about everyone else. They were the sophisticated ones; they were the ones who had transcended the shortsighted and parochial limits of outdated religions like Judaism. That prejudice, in turn, is reinforced by Paul’s reference to “barbarians” and “Scythians.”

The origin of the word “barbarian” is uncertain, but it’s generally thought to be onomatopoeic, that is, a word whose meaning derives from the sound it makes. To proud Greeks, people who didn’t know the language sounded like they were speaking gibberish: bar-bar-bar-bar-bar. “Barbarian,” therefore, came to mean not only someone who didn’t speak Greek, but someone perceived as unsophisticated, rude, and unrefined. That insult, in turn, is deepened in Paul’s reference to “Scythians” (a word used only this one time in the New Testament) — basically, the most savage and barbaric of the barbarians. Add to that the reference to being “slave” or “free,” one of the most fundamental social distinctions of stratified Roman society, and Paul’s list is complete.

Why would Paul need to say this? Imagine a newly planted Gentile church which may have had a few Jews in the fellowship, Jews who had put their faith in Jesus as their Messiah. The congregation would also have drawn from different strata of society: the rich and the poor, people who had never been slaves, used to be slaves, or were still slaves. What united them was their shared commitment to and union in Christ; what divided them were the old prejudices and perceptions defined by Roman society.

Were these brothers and sisters in Christ tempted to follow their old nature and look down on one another? Is that why Paul tells them that they needed to set aside their habits of anger, rage, malice, slander, and every kind of ugly and inappropriate speech? Maybe; who knows?

But in their new nature, a nature continually being renewed, they were to seek a more heavenly way of thinking and see themselves as a new family in Christ. It raises an important question for us: which members of our new family are we tempted to disdain?