“A crowd seated around him told him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and your sisters
are outside asking for you.’ But he said to them in reply, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’
And looking around at those seated in the circle he said , ‘Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’”
Mark

When Mary agreed to become the mother of Jesus, she probably didn’t know how hard her life would be. Today’s passage from Mark is just one example of what she endured and how she coped with her unique role in history.

In the passage, Jesus teaches an extremely important lesson – that all people who try to do the will of God are his family, not just his blood relatives. It speaks to Jesus’ embrace of a universal vision of humanity that was quite at odds with the village society he grew up in. But in doing so, he seems to disrespect his actual mother and relatives.
I can’t help wondering how his words felt to Mary because she surely knew that she would suffer repercussions from them.  I imagine the local gossips  blaming Mary for raising  a crazy man who wandered around telling people what to do, not having a job or raising a family.

Ironically of course, they would have been right. Mary most certainly played an important role in shaping Jesus’ world view because that’s what mothers do.  But too often Christians fail to give Mary the credit she deserves for shaping Jesus.

Whenever I read a gospel passage featuring Mary, I find myself focusing on her graceful strength -- so different than the syrupy, saccharine images we were fed as children along with all the pretty hymns and May crownings. In the paintings of the Madonna’s, Mary never seems like a real person. Only  Michelangelo’s Pieta gives us a sense of the strength of this long suffering woman.

I developed a devotion to Mary when I started paying attention to the Mary of the gospels even though their writers often downplay her role. This Mary never wore silks or lived in a marble palace. She was a poor woman married to a man who worked with his hands. Her home and clothing must have been rudimentary. She knew how hard it was to raise a kid and the suffering kids put their parents through like when Jesus stayed in Jerusalem to preach at the temple, scaring her to death.

I believe Jesus developed his devotion to the poor the way most of us develop our values – from watching our mothers model what’s important to them. When Jesus tells us to feed the hungry and help the stranger, that didn’t come from thin air. He’d surely spent year seeing his mom sharing with those who had less, including hungry strangers who wandered through Nazareth. So I resonate to what Jesus says  in this passage about God’s universal family of people doing his will because much of it must have come from Mary’s example.

The Mary whom Jesus seems to thrust into the background in this passage also models the unconditional love that mothers have for their children, even when their “crazy” views and behavior make life more difficult for themselves.