28 January 2020 - model family

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

“Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of God
is my brother and sister and mother.”

We are called to be more closely united to Jesus than any natural bond of family or friendship. We are indeed called to forsake any natural relationship that comes into conflict with the primacy of Jesus. This is the case precisely because our relationship with Jesus is something more than a natural family bond and not less.

We are called to enter into the life of the Trinity, to become partakers of the divine nature (see Second Peter 1:4). The Fatherhood of God is the source of earthly fatherhood (see Ephesians 3:15). When such earthly family life comes into conflict with the archetype on which is built it becomes malignant, something less than it was meant to be.

We might think that we ought to dismiss than merely natural to prefer the supernatural. From this statement of Jesus we might believe that we are called to shun our earthly families for a purely spiritual family. But this is not so. We are called to ensure that our earthly families, insofar as it depends on us, embody the archetypal family. We are called first to receive the Holy Spirit who cries out, 'Abba! Father!' in our own lives. Having received him we are called to let him make our families more like the Trinity.

“Your mother and your brothers and your sisters
are outside asking for you.”

Things will be different when the Trinity is our closest kin, our first family. God will have first claim on us, heart and soul. We cannot allow ourselves to be called away from this center. Instead, everything else must be organized around it.

David shows us how to place our concern for the LORD first. He shows us how to do so without regard to what people might think. In doing so, he shows us the joy that is the result.
Then David, girt with a linen apron,
came dancing before the LORD with abandon,
as he and all the house of Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD
with shouts of joy and to the sound of the horn.

When the LORD is first we have more to offer. We have draw others along with ourselves to the bread that satisfies unto eternal life.

He then distributed among all the people,
to each man and each woman in the entire multitude of Israel,
a loaf of bread, a cut of roast meat, and a raisin cake.