In the movie, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays a man named Ray who is trying to learn how to be a successful farmer. He didn’t grow up on a farm, but he has a lot working in his favor. For one, he lives in Iowa, which is a place God made for growing food. He has a beautiful, fertile piece of acreage, and he lives in a community of farmers, from whom he can learn a lot.
But one evening he is walking in his cornfield and he hears a voice. “If you build it, he will come.”
After that, it’s one weird thing after another, and he ends up ploughing under his cornfield to build a baseball diamond so all the ghosts of ballplayers past can come out and play.
And his wife Annie gets it. Somehow, she gets it. But their relatives and the community all think he’s lost his mind. In Iowa, land is money. Your crop is your livelihood – it pays the mortgage, it puts food on the table, it’s what keeps the economy churning. What Ray is doing makes no sense at all. He must be out of his mind.
Something like that is happening in this episode from the gospel. Jesus’ family is really worried about Jesus. It is not clear what they have actually witnessed, but people are saying that he has lost his mind. And Lord, have mercy – When you hear those words, “people are saying…” you know trouble is on your doorstep.
His family members are not the only ones who want him stopped. Talk about Jesus has even reached Jerusalem and the temple scribes have come all the way to Galilee, so they could charge Jesus with doing the devil’s work. Which is very disturbing, to say the least.
The whole story is rather disturbing. His family, the ones who should know him best, are trying to restrain him from doing the work of his ministry. And the religious authorities, who should be encouraging of the kind of work he is doing, casting out demons and such, are flat-out condemning him.
Yet, there are others – many others – who see what Jesus is doing, see who Jesus is. He has healing in his touch and in his words. He bears the power of God in his body. They will follow him wherever he goes.
The crowds of people will follow him. They know he is not out of his mind. They know he is not possessed by evil. These people – they get Jesus. As Jesus acknowledges, they are as close to him as family.
As the distance grows between Jesus and his family of origin, the bonds are forged between Jesus and his faith family. As the hostility grows between Jesus and the religious heads, a new faith is nurtured for the ones who see Jesus is creating a new way.
“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
This is one of several stories in the gospels where Jesus speaks against family. It is a kind of passage that makes us uneasy. Family is important. Family is where we learn about love and loyalty and how to care for one another. It confuses us, to say the least, when Jesus seems to urge his followers to throw out family like it’s just garbage.
In disparaging family, Jesus is attacking the very social fabric. This is threatening, not just to his family members but to the leaders of this society, including the scribes who come down from Jerusalem. Yet, the crowds who have begun following him now, they are not alarmed. It may be that they can see something the others cannot: that Jesus is deconstructing one thing for the purpose of building something new.
He is the new wine that cannot be forced into old wineskins; he is the new light by which we may see God’s extraordinary purpose for us. He is the life through which we can see and receive divine love, by which the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, evil is overcome, the dead are given new life.
Old structures have to give way to the new. Old beliefs and values have to be traded in for the new.
But, still, his family members stand at the edges of the crowd and insist that Jesus must be restrained. He must be stopped. This is not good for him; it is not good for us.
The religious scribes march in and accuse him of doing the work of evil. They do not see something new and inclusive. They only see the destruction of something they thought was just fine.
The call to follow God may sometimes set us at odds with the people we love, the people who are our people.
It may be helpful to bear in mind, at such times, that healthy family ties leave plenty of room for disagreement. Family is not required to be of the same mind on everything. And that is one of the things I love about the Presbyterian Church, in fact. Unlike some other churches, we are not required to agree on all things. There is lots of room for healthy disagreement, for respectful and loving dialog about all kinds of things.
As the Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Corinthian church, “love bears all things.” If we have love we can get through all kinds of disagreements, all sorts of struggles and hardships. Even in a relationship that seems as though it has reached a breaking point, there is still hope that love will prevail. In the world, as it does in the movies.
In Field of Dreams, the family dispute about the baseball field got so intense that Ray and Annie were on the verge of losing the farm. Annie’s brother Mark comes over with papers for them to sign, that would hand over the farm to the bank. But then something happened, and Mark suddenly sees it. He sees the vision, the dream, Ray and Annie have seen all along.
And so this is how I see the relationship with Jesus and his family. It’s not good right now, but this does not have to be a permanent break. If they can only see what he sees, there is hope. And for the scribes, too, if they can only see…
But if they do see, and still, they hold fast to their conviction that his work is evil; that the work of healing, of feeding, of overpowering evil with love, of making people as whole as they can be – if they insist that this is of the devil? If they reject the love that is God’s nature? Well, they have chosen to make that break permanent. God does not force us to accept God’s love. This may be the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of which Jesus speaks.
The hard truth is that we don’t have the whole truth. We are still works in progress. The best we can do – and must do – is to seek to stay close to Jesus, to follow the will of God. And a pretty good rule of thumb would be anything that brings someone to his or her fullest and most authentic personhood, anything that allows humans and all of creation to thrive, anything that increases love, is the will of God.
It is a hard thing for humans to do the will of God, as Jesus says, when we would so much rather do the will of ourselves.
To be a disciple of Christ in the world today offers us many opportunities to make this distinction – between our own desires and God’s desires. But we can. We can be in that circle surrounding Jesus, following him, loving him. We can learn to see the world and everyone in it through the eyes of God. It just takes practice.
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