Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news,  who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29-30)

There is a basic claim in the gospel message of Jesus, that we cannot avoid or ignore: the natural biological family can never come first for followers of Jesus. Family stands underneath Jesus’s call for total commitment to God’s coming kingdom. What this may mean in different contexts, times, and places will certainly vary, but I would suggest that there is a core truth in Jesus’s statement, which is echoed in different ways throughout the New Testament, namely that in every place and in every time, the Gospel challenges and re-shapes natural relationships, even and perhaps especially, the natural family relationship.

In fact, it is important to remember that the New Testament as a whole has little, if anything positive to say about the natural family as such. Instructions to families and family members consistently are framed within the larger call to the church members about how to relate to one another (submit to one another, be kind to one another, do not provoke one another, etc). The primary bond is always the bond of discipleship, the brother-sisterhood of Christ that is lived out in the peoplehood of the church. Natural families are not cast aside or rejected, but they are relativized. Families are secondary and penultimate. The brother-sisterhood of Christ, the familihood of the church is what is primary and ultimate. The message of the gospel, as Jesus and the apostles preached it is never one of “family first” or “focus on the family.” Rather natural family only has meaning in the context of the more basic, fundamental relationship that we share as brothers and sisters of Christ in the family of God. This is reflected in Paul’s opening call in our reading this week from Romans 12:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.  Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Now this may sound compelling and beautiful, and so it is. However, there is great risk in diving in and embracing this vision of the church as real and true family, and that is the risk of real and profound loss. The great comfort of the natural family is the perceived security, permanence, and stability that it commands. Spouses make vows to one another, that even today are harder to dispense with than other forms of relationship. The parent-child relationship is biological and one-sided. Children live for years and years in dependence on their parents, and as such this relationship is not likely to be easily severed. Natural family is a great draw because it feels safe, solid, given. The relationships of natural family feel safe because in them we feel we have control.

Relationships in the church however, especially today are much more transient, tentative, open to revision–more risky. Do we really dare to say, as Jesus does “Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35)? The closeness of the family bond involves vulnerability, openness, and being truly and deeply known. There is risk in opening that relationship outward to embrace others, others who didn’t grow up with us, who we didn’t birth and raise, who we didn’t spend years getting to know ahead of time before we threw in our lots together as spouses. Opening up that relationship means risk: the risk of loss, of betrayal, of conflict, of alienation.

And so the church has tended to settle for less to avoid this risk. We retain walls and boundaries of safety between each other to protect ourselves from the possible pain of losing one another and hurting one another. What happens if we make ourselves vulnerable, open our lives fully to one another as family, and then someone, a brother or sister in the truest sense, someone who had become true and real family to us then decides to leave, to take their life elsewhere? We imagine we can avoid the pain of real loss if we avoid the real depth of relationship, relationship in which we dare to actually let ourselves need each other, depend on on each other, become as Paul says “members of one another.” C.S. Lewis spoke well of this risk in his The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Do we dare embrace the vulnerability of true brother-sisterhood? This one of the questions with which we must reckon.

However, there is another reason beyond fear of loss and pain that we may avoid Jesus’s call to true brother-sisterhood which we must name and face. Perhaps we do not fear losing our brothers and sisters, perhaps what we fear is truly being stuck with them. What about our autonomy, our freedom, our control over our lives and decisions? To truly bind ourselves to one another as family means embracing the limitations that other people impose on us. Just as natural families limit our horizons and make claims on us that shut down other possibilities, so too does embracing the brother-sisterhood of Christ. We no longer live to ourselves, and we no longer die to ourselves. Here we belong not first to ourselves, or to our natural families, but to each other in Christ. This means being imposed upon, needed, and limited.

And perhaps we just don’t want that. We imagine that we can have genuine, deep, and satisfying relationships with one another while still keeping each other at arm’s length. We imagine that we can have “community” without sacrifice, without the giving up of our American longing for unfettered, self-determining freedom. If we are really to live as brothers and sisters, as family, this may mean that we can’t take certain jobs that would choke off our time to give ourselves to life together. It may mean that I can’t take off for a year to hike the PCT because one of you may need me. It may mean that we can’t take vacations whenever we want so that our resources can support a brother in financial need. It may mean that we can’t have it all–which, if we’re honest we really do expect to be able to do pretty much all of the time. This is a reality we have to reckon with, that we have to truly face and not sweep under the rug. There is a cost to family, and it must be counted if we are really to be all in together.

But in the face of this very real risk and cost stands the word of Jesus’s promise: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30). The question for is is unflinchingly direct: Do we believe this? Do we believe that the sacrifice, the risk, the limits, and the losses are worth it? Do we believe that we will be given far above what we could ask or imagine if we embrace this vulnerability?

Or do we ultimately believe the world’s story? That we must play it safe, take care of ourselves and our natural family, maybe have friendships, but making sure that they are all well-controlled and distant enough to protect us? That is the question we must wrestle with as we struggle to live out what it means that we really are, in Christ, a true family.