Family Sunday
Jeremiah 31:7-9; Hebrews 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52
It is a web, stronger than that of a spider, because no one could survive without it; it is a bond, because no one could exist outside of it: it is called FAMILY. Before we start making distinctions among ourselves, our families define us. After coming of age and making our own decisions, our families nurture the values we bear and cherish. In our own adult lives, we begin our own families; we nurture and provide values we want for them. There is only one FAMILY, the family of God.
This Sunday is “Family Sunday”, the fact that every human being belongs to the family of God. The initiative to remind human beings that they make up the family of God is the message of our first reading. To do this, God takes particular interest in those who suffer, because they have been cast out of their families and lands and denied the feeling of family membership. Israelites, out in Babylon, by themselves, they suffer loneliness, hatred, ill-treatment and the risk of dying. This is the fate of those without a family!
Our first reading teaches us that God seeks out the lonely and the unloved to bring them home to enjoy the protection of family life. After all, every blood is red, irrespective of skin pigmentations. God has no problems with the Babylonians or any people, because they too are his children and their blood is red! Among themselves — Babylonians — they were at home, happy and loved. But the unhappiness and loneliness of Israel in Babylon is a sign that they were not at home and unhappy. The proof is their song, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, remembering Zion”.
Bringing Israel out of Babylon to its own home land is building a family. According to our first reading, God says “For I am a father to Israel, Ephraim is my first-born” (Jeremiah 31:9). “Israel” is not one tribe, “Israel” is everyone who is oppressed: “I will gather them from the ends of the world, with the blind and the lame in their midst, the mothers and those with child; they shall return as an immense throng”.
“Globalization” helps us to understand what “family” is: any place where we are at home and find love, peace, justice and happiness. The “Fatherhood” of God is the humanity that reaches out to the unloved, the lonely, the oppressed and the sad. Wherever these unpalatable situations are found, family life disintegrates and falls apart. Only togetherness creates family, desiring for others what we want for ourselves.
God, in Jesus Christ, belonged to a family. The exclamation, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me”, places Jesus within a human family: he was the son of David. Not only Jesus, the one who invokes Jesus’ family root belongs to a family too: “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus”. The “son of Timaeus” seeks the help of the “son of David”. Today, if we pay attention, we will hear the same cry for compassion from our brothers and sisters in need. It is by helping one another, rather than being indifferent to others’ needs, that we form a family.
Family Sunday is a call to enlarge our family sizes by bringing in those blind “Bartimaeuses” left in the streets to beg; to spare a room for strangers, the immigrants, all those who look and behave differently from us, to create a family of human beings! It may be our physical blindness/disability, poverty, illness, race, gender, etc. that cause our rejection from family life.
If scattered Israelites return home at God’s initiative, and Bartimaeus gets reintegration into the society by the restoration of his sight, God expects us to create a global family of those living and behaving like one family, with no one falling through the cracks of our societies. If Jesus did it for Bartimaeus, he expects us to carry out the reintegration of everyone on the margins of society into a common family life of God’s children.
Family Sunday reminds us of the source of true greatness — taking people into our families. In the words of our second reading, “it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest, but rather the one who said to him: You are my son: this day I have begotten you”. By helping everyone and rejecting no one, the priesthood of Jesus Christ embraces all and sundry. This new priesthood is universal, beyond the tribe of Levi, for humanity is global and sacred. The rules have changed, there are no more outsiders, we are all insiders, one family.
Family Sunday is about practical love and sacrifice, not just words and theories. As long as some people are left in the streets and others are indifferent to their plights, so long would we fail to be the family of God that we need to be. In fact, there was a double healing in our gospel: the physical healing of Bartimaeus’ blindness, but also the healing of the heart and spirit of the disciples of Jesus, who started out hushing Bartimaeus but ended up encouraging him to come forward for his healing to join and enjoy the family of those with functional eyesight!
Family Sunday encourages us to heal our personal indifference to the blindness our society inflicts on others that make them unfit for our family membership. The example of Jesus, reintegrating Bartimaeus into the family of the society that left him for beggar on the streets, must guide our hearts to reach out to all in need to bring them in. Let us reach out to those left behind, like the disciples of Jesus did today: “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.” But we must “get up” ourselves to our responsibilities of reintegration, before we can encourage those in need to follow suit.
Assignmentfor the Week :
Make a stranger feel like a member of your family this week.