Word of Salvation – Vol.12 No.52 – December 1966

 

Who Is My Mother?

 

Sermon Rev. J. Jonker on Mark 3:31-35 & John 6:40

Scripture Reading: Psalm 87, Revelation 7: 9-12

Psalter Hymnal: 95:1,2,3; 354:2; 435:1,3; 175:4,5

 

Beloved Congregation,

It is interesting to get to know WHY people do as they do, say what they say.  Don’t you agree that a little prying into the reasons why people do what they do is an intriguing business?  Just note the members of your family and look around you in the congregation and ask yourself why did that boy lose interest in that girl?  Why are that man and his wife always fighting while they just cannot do without each other?  What are the motives that make people go?

For it is a well-established fact that various people do the same things but for quite different reasons!  Why for instance do people leave their home country to migrate to another?  Principally they do this to get a better life in the new country than they had it in the old one at home.  But even here there is a wide variety!

The one went to get better housing; another to get better pay and many just because they wanted freedom.  Freedom from the oppressing walls of a built-up city, freedom from convention, freedom from the narrow situation in their church.  And better chances for their children and a better climate than in the rainy, sunless atmosphere of little Holland.

It did not become apparent anyhow that anybody migrated to Australia because he wanted to have a better opportunity to know and serve his Saviour and his God.  I am afraid that if the Lord Jesus was an item on the preference list for the emigrant at all His place was well at the bottom of the list.  We must be so honest as to concede that this fact establishes the major difference between the situation in our churches and that in the churches of the United States.  We like to compare ourselves with the churches in the States but without a genuine right to do so.  Perhaps the migrants to the United States of this twentieth century may go because worldly improvement was their major aim, this is decidedly not so for the men and women who established the first churches in the States in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Just remind yourself of the Pilgrim-fathers and of the Dutchies who came with van Raalte and established what is now Grand Rapids.

People migrated to America to find freedom to serve their Lord according to His word first of all.  While they did not count the cost to their own comfort and welfare they found what they desired: the freedom to serve God.  As they were seeking the Kingdom of God in the first place they were eventually blessed in abundance with the other things that were thrown into their laps.  The migration to Australia shows a completely different aspect and has different motives.  Its origin was much more materialistic, which on its own merits does not have to be reprehensible, but does have no promise of special blessings.  All spiritual things had to be improvised after arrival here.  You did not come to this country because of the pressing need to find ways to serve Jesus Christ.  But now this is the problem that has to be threshed out this day: how is your attitude towards Jesus Christ now you are here?  How do you feel about Him?  What is He in your life and how do you behave towards Him and His Church?

For this is an undeniable fact that Jesus Christ came to you and again today is here seeking you!  He has been calling you by His word year after year and week by week.  Just as Jesus came to His people on earth in the body now over 1900 years ago, so He comes to you in the service of His church by the gospel that is preached to you and the sacraments that guarantee that He once died to wash your guilt away and to feed you to life eternal.  You have come here, all of you, to hear about Him, to hear His voice and some of you may even have come because you could not keep going on your own any longer.

Now the situation is like this that none of us can guess how or why other people came to Him.  Sometimes it is not even clear in our own mind how we ourselves came to Him and why particularly we are in church today.  Just as is the case in migration to Australia there may be all kind of different reasons why we go to Jesus.  There may be good reasons and there may be wrong ones.  Now for a fact nobody will say that Mary, Jesus’ mother, was an unbeliever, neither will anybody pretend that she would be excluded from salvation, but still our text shows that Mary and her children were once criticised by Jesus because they showed a wrong attitude towards Him.  Consequently the conclusion is to be made that if even Mary and Jesus’ brothers and sisters could go wrong regarding Him we should be all the more careful that we should not go wrong in our attitude to Him!

Jesus says: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

This declaration of our Saviour is what we would like to hear Him say with regard to us, wouldn’t we?  Consequently it is worthwhile to find out how this was meant and in what way it can be of value to us.

Jesus was preaching in some place and many people were listening to Him – quite a crowd was sitting around Him.  Those people went to greater lengths to hear God’s message than many of us like to go nowadays.  Perhaps you may remark in your hearts: small wonder they did, for they could go to hear Jesus Himself and we have to do with a preaching minister or as today even a reading service by an elder.  And you are right, that’s true, quite true.  But still please realise that they could only hear the truth spoken in parables, while we, who are living after Pentecost, may hear the full truth in plain words.  Those people then could only HOPE for forgiveness of their sins while the gospel that is given to us by the ministry of the apostles tells us all that Jesus has done to BRING forgiveness!

As long as Jesus was on earth there was a veil over the truth of God’s mercy while in our days we can read the prophecies and promises but in addition we may read and hear about the grand fulfilment.  While during Jesus’ earthly life they could only HOPE on life we are now allowed to know how Christ by His death has brought the sacrifice that procured life for us.  For us Jesus Christ is the Lord who has risen from the dead and opened the gates of life.  How strange is it that but so few people seem to care about that… how strange and how infinitely sad as if Jesus had come in vain!

When you once will stand before Jesus in the day of judgment there won’t be one of you who can excuse himself because he did not know about it.

But let us return to our text.  There was a crowd about Jesus.  Then His mother and His brothers came.  And what did they do?  Did they join the crowd?  Did they sit down to listen to Him like the others?  Did they want to hear Him bring the Word of God?

No, oh no… they remained standing and standing outside the circle.

One of them tapped someone’s shoulder and bent down to give a message: please tell Him that His mother and brothers want to see Him!  It was whispered from the one to the other until one who was right in front of Jesus interrupted Him saying: “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you…!”

Quite normal, this request…don’t you think so?

After all a mother is a mother and brothers have their privilege too, haven’t they?  Quite normal… that they want to share in Jesus’ glory and fame and like to show how near they are to Him.  Does not in our days a mother show how proud she is when her son was decorated because of gallantry in the war in Viet nam?

“…they are outside, asking for you…!”  Obviously they think that they have a hold on Jesus, that they can push Him and that they have a right to Jesus so that He has to do their bidding.

And this is what is denied by Jesus and He refuses to obey very pointedly.  He replied in full public: “Who are my mother and my brothers?”  What do you think about that?  Is not that the limit?  Is that the way to treat a mother, your family?  Apparently it is!  Jesus makes it very clear that He does not recognize any ties that people may think they have with Him.  Nobody can make any demand on Him because he should be a privileged person, somebody with a special relationship with Him.

The ties between Jesus and us never originate on our side.  Of course Mary loves her son Jesus.  Of course she appreciates Him.  She is proud of Him.  Mary knew but too well that He was a very special person.  She knew about the angel Gabriel who came to her in Nazareth, she knew about his birth and from the shepherds she had even heard that angels had been singing over the fields of Ephrata.  She had fled with Him to Egypt to escape the murdering soldiers of Herod.  But she is wrong when she thinks that this puts her into a position where she can order Him about!  Or where she can interrupt His work.  So we have to recognize that we can even in our love for Jesus show a sinful approach to Him!  And we should beware of that and at any price try to avoid it!

Whosoever we may be… whatsoever our connections with gospel and church may be… we never have any say whatsoever over Jesus!  We should never remain OUTSIDE… imagining that we would be too good for the normal crowd.  This is a danger among Christians that we should realise.  Always there are persons that think that they are “special”.  And if they don’t deem themselves personally to be special, then quite often they think that anyhow their opinions and their views have a decided preference.  How much build-up of theories in theology there is… all tending in some way to dictate the truth.

Let us face the simple fact that the first importance never is that you profess Jesus Christ your Saviour but that Jesus wants to BE your Saviour.  That is the same for you as for Mary and Paul and for every one of us… just as it is testified with regard to every baptised baby.

Listen to our text: “And looking around on those who sat about him, He said: ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’”

I may point out to you that Jesus here includes sisters so that no girl can say that she should have to remain outside of the close family of Jesus.  Sometimes women are deemed to be inferior to men in spiritual matters but with Jesus Himself this is not the case.  In the first Christian church the believers knew this so well that there were women serving in the office of a deaconess.  But this by the way.

It is wonderful to belong to that company of Jesus’ family!  How wonderful a comfort it is when we face all perils of life and death.  Is it not amazing that this even may go for us although most of our adults migrated to Australia for purely materialistic reasons?  Only WHEN does this apply to us?

When can we be brother, sister, mother of Jesus?  This is the case when it is true for us what Jesus says: whoever does the will of God.  And what can that be?  Has this to do with the law of the Ten Commandments?  Look at our text: those people sitting around Jesus had something of it… what did they do?  They listened to Him.

Jesus speaks more explicitly about this doing of the will of God in John 6:40: “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life.”  Eternal life is the prize promised, the goal set by God.  And the way to get hold of it is: to SEE the Son and to BELIEVE in Him.  To see and to believe in the Son, He says.  The SON…. yes but not the Son of Mary without more but the Son of God!

Jesus the Son of God…who is Jesus the Son of man and at the same time the Son of God.  He came into human flesh to pay the price of His life so as to pay for our sin and guilt.  In His awful agony He died, forsaken by God, who did not rescue Him out of the hands of sinful man, who was a willing slave of the devil.  But He who died on the cross was called back to life by God on Easter morning to show that all our sins were forgiven, completely forgiven, tossed away in a sea of eternal oblivion.  And now this risen Lord calls us by His word.

He did not come to do our bidding, but asks of us that we believe in Him our Saviour.  To do the will of God means that we believe that Jesus forgives our sins so that we on our part should forgive them that trespass against us.

Before this Son of God’s mercy and glory all our importance just melts away as snow before the sun.

Before Him we are just one of a crowd, but a crowd of His brothers and sisters and mothers.

We cannot bring anything to Him but we may receive everything from Him.  He will even raise you up on the last day – the resurrection of the flesh.

Now you have all of you heard it once more.  There is one narrow gate open to life.  For those who will not do the will of God and do not believe in Jesus His Son there is no promise that Jesus will save you at the last day.

The promise is wonderful but also the warning is evident.  No earthly ties will ever help you!  The only thing asked is belief, just belief.

Amen.