Tag: We the Kinfolk

“Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon?” — Mark 6:3 NIV

One group stands out. I gather weekly with believers at Sunday morning church and in mid-week Bible studies, yet there is another group with which I have become especially close: my Kairos Prison Ministry brothers. We have repeatedly entered one mission field in particular: men held in incarceration. Weeks before a Kairos Weekend inside the prison, the team prepares and gels as one, and when it is time to enter, each man executes his assigned role, relying on all the others to do the same. It is a unity forged not only out of shared conviction of Biblical truth, but also the action toward which faith and freedom compel us. Then through this unified brotherhood, God’s light shines in a very dark place. And lives change.

Jesus was teaching as a houseguest one day, when some around him said, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.”¹ They spoke of Mary, of course, and also His natural brothers who did not believe in Him at the time.² Perhaps Jesus recalled this lyric from a messianic psalm: “I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s sons.”³ Regardless, Jesus turned the occasion into a teaching opportunity: “And he answered them, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.’”⁴

Was Jesus being disrespectful or dismissive of His earthly family? No, He was pointing His hearers to a closer, grander kinship — our eternal oneness with God through His Messiah. For through the sufferings of Jesus the Son, God the Father brought “many sons and daughters to glory,”⁵ which is to say He made us His children. In Hebrews we read, “Both the one who makes people holy [Jesus] and those who are made holy [us] are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters”⁶

Jesus came to the world as God’s only Son,⁷ then “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”⁸ Christ is our brother, and in Him we who were alienated from God are now His sons and daughters — “children of light, children of the day.”⁹ Then together as Jesus’ brothers and sisters, may we daily shine His light into very dark places. Lives will change.

Father, thank You for making us Your children through Jesus — Your Son, our brother. Shine through us, each as called, into dark places, that lives will change and Your Kingdom expand. In Christ we pray. Amen.

¹ Mark 3:32 ESV
² John 7:53
³ Psalm 69:8 ESV
⁴ Mark 3:33-35 ESV
⁵ Hebrews 2:10 NIV (emphasis added)
⁶ Hebrews 2:11 NIV
⁷ John 3:16
⁸ John 1:12 ESV (emphasis added)
⁹ 1 Thessalonians 5:5 ESV