For Jesus’ first-century disciples, estrangement from family members was a personal and social disaster. They lost their identity, their network of business and personal connections, their social and economic safety net, their prospects for future inheritance.
Jesus encouraged His disciples by promising that they would receive far more than they might lose by following Him. If they lost father and mother, or farms and houses, they would receive back a hundredfold (Mark 10:29-30). By following Jesus, they would become part of a community of “brothers” who would take care of them in extremity.
We don’t suffer nearly so much if we are ripped out of our families, and it is largely because our world has been remade by Jesus. Even non-Christians have networks of strangers who act like brothers.
Jesus didn’t command us to erect a welfare state, and there were state systems of welfare in the ancient world. But insofar as our welfare system is motivated by a sense of obligation toward strangers, it is a late and distorted shadow of Jesus’ promise to provide fathers for the fatherless, brothers for those who have been cast out, land for the landless.
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