The Siblings from Bethany

This week, the Church remembered Mary, Martha and Lazarus. I love the stories about this family in the gospels and every time I return to them, I find my focus is drawn to something different.

Mary, Martha and Lazarus were, we assume, three adult siblings who lived together; a reminder that from the earliest times in Christian history, families have come in all different shapes and sizes. They were Jesus’s close friends; so close that Lazarus is described as “the one whom Jesus loved”. Jesus weeps at the news of Lazarus’s death: a deeply human moment in St John’s gospel, which often focus on high Christology in its depiction of Christ.

At times, both Protestant and Catholic expressions of Christianity are guilty of idolizing the heteronormative nuclear family. This can be lonely and frustrating for those whose lives don’t fit that particular picture of love, care and relationship and can also cause a huge sense of pressure and unrealistic expectations for those whose lived experience exists within it. We see in the gospels that in the Kingdom of God, there are many different kinds of deep, meaningful and close loving relationships: where there is love, there is God.

The gospels challenge us to consider what we mean when we use the word “family”. The story of Mary, Martha and Lazarus also encourages us to consider whether we can be guilty of valuing people according to what they contribute, as opposed to because of their intrinsic value as children of God. In his 2017 book Dethroning Mammon, Justin Welby invites the reader to reflect upon the tradition that perhaps, as an adult male who lived with his two sisters, Lazarus “had some kind of disability or learning difficulty”. If this were the case, then Jesus’s decision to raise this particular man from the dead is a profound and radical statement about human value and worth. In a society in which ableism and indeed other types of prejudice are on the rise, as Christians we are invited to take a radical standpoint: every human being is of infinite value since they are made in the image of God.