In one sense, we might say that Christianity invented religion in that before Christianity, communities of faith were mostly ethnically and tribally based. Jesus defined a family of faith differently, telling us that it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family. For Jesus, real family is not grounded in biology, ethnicity, or nationality. It is grounded in faith.

Where does Jesus teach this? It is almost everywhere present as a motif underlying his teaching. However, it is made explicit a number of times in how he defines his relationship to his own mother and her place and status within the faith community.

There are several instances in the Gospel where Jesus seems to distance himself from his own mother. For instance, in one incident someone comes up to him and says, “your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But Jesus replies, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here is my mother and my brothers.”

In another instance, he is addressing a crowd when a woman cries out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Only to have Jesus say, “blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”

That exchange might be recast this way. A woman in the crowd is especially moved by Jesus and shouts: “You must have had a wonderful mother!” Jesus’ answer: “Yes, she was wonderful, more wonderful than you think. All mothers are wonderful in their biology. But my mother was even more wonderful in her faith!”

These incidents can be confusing at first glance because it can seem like Jesus is distancing himself from his own mother. He is not. Instead, he is redefining his relationship to his mother in a way that gives her a different (and more exalted) status: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it. The Gospels make it clear that Mary was in fact the first person who did this. Her faith in saying “let it be done to me according to your word” is what made her more special than her biology.

In the Gospels, Mary has a special status within the apostolic community not first of all because she was the biological mother of Jesus, but because she was the first one to truly hear the word of God and keep it. Her faith, more than her biology, gave her special status.

Moreover, with these responses Jesus is fundamentally redefining what constitutes true family, that is, faith more than biology determines who is your mother and who are your brothers and sisters. Real family is not determined by biology, but by faith. For Christians, it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family. True family no longer has its base in ethnicity, biology, tribe, or nation. None of these makes us brothers and sisters in the truest sense of the word family.

There are far-reaching challenges flowing from this, challenges we perennially tend to ignore. Simply put, we perennially resist defining family that widely. Instead, our propensity is to forever identify the family of faith with our own biological, ethnic, national, denominational, or ideological family, thus making God our own tribal, national, denominational, or ideological God. This gives us not only a false notion of family but also a false notion of God. In a phrase borrowed from Nikos Kazantzakis, when we do this, the bosom of God becomes a ghetto.

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?” Who is my real family?

In answering this, faith must ultimately override references to biological family, ethnicity, nationality, denominational, or ideological affinity. Those who are hearing the word of God and are keeping it are “mother, brother, and sister” to us.

Jesus’ redefinition of what constitutes family is, I believe, a much-needed challenge for us today as increasingly we are separating ourselves from each other through ideological, national, and ethnic differences and are defining family very differently than Jesus did. Identifying the family of faith with biological, ethnic, national, denominational, or ideological family is what underlies the concept of Christian nationalism and other kinds of tribalism which try to cloak themselves with Jesus and the Gospel. Those notions, however sincere, are misguided and in significant ways antithetical to Jesus and the Gospel. In Christ, as scripture assures us, we are all baptized into one body, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink. In the family of faith there is no Johnson or Rolheiser, American or Mexican, British or French, white or colored, liberal or conservative. Our real family, our family in Christ, transcends all of that – and not withstanding a healthy loyalty to biological family, denomination, and nation, asks each of us to also transcend that.