One Family in Christ!

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Mic 7: 14-15, 18-20; Mt 12: 46-50

Today’s Gospel highlights how our faith must transcend our blood family ties. 

When Jesus is talking to the crowds, his mother and relatives arrive wishing to speak to him. However, instead of meeting them, Jesus turns it into an occasion for a lesson on discipleship. 

What is Jesus’ understanding of family and kinship?

First, we must be clear that Jesus does not reject or hate his family of siblings. He knows well that even though he was the Son of God, he needed a family to be born into, headed by Joseph and Mary, who lived in a neighborhood, which would again mean a cluster of families that were most often his relatives. Hence, for Jesus, the family of blood ties mattered very much, and that is why Jesus entrusted Mary to the care of John under the cross after he himself took care of her even as he undertook the Kingdom proclamation. But for Jesus, the family of blood ties is not an end in itself for a Christian. That is where Jesus points to the enlarged family of faith or family of believers.

For Jesus, receiving a Christian vocation means not confining oneself within the boundaries of a biological family. Our faith in Christ must help us transcend our ties to the immediate family and join hands with the family of disciples that stretches across nations, continents, and cultures. In fact, every baptized member becomes an integral part of this enlarged family of faith, thus turning everyone into our brothers and sisters. What is more, Jesus offers the concept of the enlarged family of disciples as a corrective to our notions of family, which often tend to be exclusive or narrow or even possessive. Thus, by explaining the significance of the enlarged family of faith, Jesus helps us see that true faith expands our hearts so that we become ‘all things for all people’ (I Cor 9: 22) in the name of Jesus, as Paul himself claimed. When we forget this, the beauty and richness of Christian life are themselves lost. 

This is how, for a priest or a religious, the faithful of any country or place become their people and family. In the same way, for the faithful of any country or context, a priest or a religious becomes their own pastor or faith-giver in the name of Jesus. Today, we are privileged with the idea of the universal Church because of the notion of the enlarged family of disciples that Jesus enlightens us about.

Through his teaching, Jesus wants us not to become captives of blood relationships. For a Christian, the family of origin cannot become our only measure of love and loyalty. With Jesus enlarging our vision, people from other contexts, cultures, and countries and the suffering and needy humanity from another part of the world all become part of the family of disciples. 

Let us pray that, in the name of Jesus, the boundaries of our love and loyalty may get ever wider to include the family of disciples too.

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar