January 24, 2026 -- Saturday of the 2nd Week "B"
2 Samuel 1,1-4. 11-12. 17. 19. 23-27; Mk 3,20-21
H O M I L Y
This very short Gospel is certainly not easy to understand and to comment. We have to remember that, after his Baptism, in Judea, and his 40-day fast, Jesus decided to return to Galilee, where he had grown up, and were he had lived with his family up to that time. The beginning of his ministry there were quite successful. Of course, everyone knew him in Nazareth; and when he began to preach in the Synagogue, people sai: "Is this not the carpenter, Joseph's son?" In Capharnaüm also, crowds of people came to listen to him and brought their sick, whom he cured. The crowds of ordinary, simple people, followed him. But the scribes and the Pharisees had already begun to voice their criticism. Now it is his own family that says : "enough is enough!".
When Jesus began to act as a prophet, they looked at him with amazement, thinking that it would not last. Now that crowds surrounds him so much that he does not even have time to eat; they feel it is time to tell him to stop all of that and come back home. Actually they come to "take charge of him", because they consider that he is out of his mind. We will see in the following verses that his mother was with them. His mother had certainly faith in him. Since the moment he said to her, some twenty years before, that he must attend to the things of his Father, she had been meditating those things in her heart. She believes, but she probably does not understand fully yet was is happening. As for the rest of his family, the Gospel says that even they did not believe in him.
We know what Jesus will say when he will be told that his mother and is brothers are outside and want to talk with him. "Who are my brothers and my mother?" In the people of Israel, the links with the family had an extreme importance. They conditioned all the life. You had to love your family and your tribe and to consider all the others as enemies. Jesus, who is calling to a universal love, beyond the limits of family, tribe and nation, wants to break that possession, that domination of the family over the individual. "Unless you renounce your father, mother, sister, brother, etc... in order to follow me, you cannot be my disciple". We see in today's text that this is precisely what he did, when he begin his public life. And his family did not understood. They are sure he is mad, and they come to take hold of him and bring him back home.
Those who are called to follow Christ must not be surprised if what they do is not understood, even by those who are closest and dearest to them. When we come into existence, we are born into a family. Through that family, if we grow up normally, we are born into society. Likewise, when we receive Christ's call we are born into the People of God, the Church. And if we have the special call to monastic life, we are born into a monastic community. This belonging to a new family implies that we maintain our love for our natural family and especially for the two persons who brought us to the world. But it implies also that we are freed for the domination of the natural family over our existence, so that we can be totally open to the universal love,at the example of the One who gave his life in order to make one single family of all the nations.