“These are My mother and brothers,” Jesus said. As rich as that can be, we were also made to pair off and reproduce. But the world is broken. Some never find that person; some who do turn out to be infertile. For those of us in one of those categories, our lives can become tragically empty as we get older. In the new family that Jesus is building, that never need be the case.
In Jesus’ family, He acknowledges the wound, and promises to transcend it: “Sing, you barren…for more are the children of the desolate than of the married woman” and again, “Nor let the eunuch say, ‘Here I am, a dry tree,’…to them I will give in My house and within My walls a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.”
Let us not forget, Jesus Himself died childless at 33. We don’t imagine that He has no family; why do we think that we don’t? If He can stand and say, “Here am I, and the children God has given me” — a phrase from Isaiah that the author of Hebrews puts (metaphorically) in His mouth at the height of a dizzying display of synthetic Old Testament Messianic theology — then what’s stopping us from claiming the same family?
What’s His is ours; that was the whole point.
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