Honor, Shame, and Real Greatness

These verses from Luke 11 closely resemble another, perhaps more well-known, passage that appears in Mark and Matthew. In that story Jesus’s family, disturbed by his recent activities and concerned that he might be out of his mind or possessed by a demon, comes to take him home, by force if necessary. Because of the great crowd jammed into the house to hear his teachings, however, they can’t get in to see him. So they send word: “Jesus, your mother and brothers are here.” Whether he suspects their intent or simply doesn’t wish to be disturbed, Jesus offers this stinging rebuke: “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those [sitting] around him, he [says], ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (Mark 3:33–34).

We perhaps cannot appreciate the enormity of the scandal this statement must represent in Jesus’s first-century honor-based culture. Jesus, a firstborn son, likely has already raised eyebrows by taking to the road as an itinerant preacher instead of staying home and taking care of his mother. But to set anyone or anything over and above one’s family this explicitly is beyond the pale. The average observer would likely conclude that Jesus has no honor in the first place.

Jesus’s point, of course, which he dramatizes by this hyperbolic statement, is that one’s commitment to the commonwealth of God must be utterly radical. It must outweigh every other claim, even those most basic to one’s identity, such as family relationships. In his mind, following God is all that matters, and anything that gets in the way of that duty must be dropped and walked away from. Anything and anyone.

Luke softens the rough edges of Jesus’s claim a little in his version of the story, but he still draws a line in the sand. In Luke’s telling, after hearing a bit of wisdom from Jesus, a woman in the crowd cries out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” (v. 27), to which Jesus replies, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (v. 28).

Jesus is again taking on the honor-and-shame system by which both men and women determined their worth. For women, under most circumstances the only conceivable way to accrue honor for themselves and their families is through childbirth and childrearing. Thus the woman’s benediction on Jesus’s mother’s breasts and uterus. It is the highest acclamation she can imagine, bound as she is by the cultural ties of the honor code.

But Jesus rejects that narrow understanding by once again directing attention to the necessity of hearing and doing God’s will. In refusing the woman’s blessing, however, Jesus is inviting her into a newly liberated notion of her capacity and worth before God. No matter what restrictions society places on you because of your gender, he says, you are one of God’s beloved children, and you have the capability to follow God and participate in God’s commonwealth. He is encouraging her (and all women, and all marginalized persons, and all who feel limited in what they can offer) to come to a new understanding of what is possible. The blessing comes not through your traditional roles, but through your commitment to the way of God.

Martin Luther King once said, “Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.”Jesus is saying the same thing. You are no longer held back by your traditional place in society; you no longer have to suffer shame for being childless; you no longer have to play by the restrictive rules of an unjust system. You can hear and obey. You can serve. You can be great in the commonwealth of God.