Mark 10:29 to 30 · Subject · Loneliness
The Lonely in Families
Scripture gives the lonely a household in the church, and it gives the church commands for taking them in.
From the cross Jesus gave His mother a son and the disciple He loved a mother.
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for My sake and for the gospel will fail to receive a hundredfold in the present age—houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and fields, along with persecutions—and in the age to come, eternal life.
- Books
- Mark, 1 Timothy, Psalms
- Hold in memory
- Galatians 6:10
Summary
Jesus promised those who leave kin and home for His sake brothers, sisters, mothers and children in this age, and the apostles told believers to treat one another as parents and siblings. The church is charged to care for widows and orphans, to welcome strangers and to keep meeting together. These commands are given to the church as a body, and so to every congregation.
- Jesus' hundredfold in Mark 10:30 comes in this present age and with persecutions, before eternal life in the age to come.
- A widow enrolled by the church had to be at least sixty years old and well known for good deeds (1 Timothy 5:9 to 10).
- Paul writes that anyone who does not provide for his own household "has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever" (1 Timothy 5:8).
What Scripture Gives the Lonely
The Lonely in Families asks what Scripture gives a lonely person and a church to do. It belongs to the trial of loneliness, because the Bible answers the lonely first with an act of God and then with commands to His people. The question at its centre is whether the family God promises the lonely is a hope for the age to come only or a household in this one.
It gives the practice with its verses and three readings of the hundredfold Jesus promised.
That act of God stands in Psalm 68:6, "God settles the lonely in families".
Seven Steps from Scripture
The church and the lonely each have their part, and each part has its verse.
- 1Love one another as kinThe command is "Be devoted to one another in brotherly love."Romans 12:10
- 2Treat the church as familyPaul tells Timothy, "Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity."1 Timothy 5:1 to 2
- 3Do good first to the family of faithPaul writes, "let us do good to everyone, and especially to the family of faith."Galatians 6:10
- 4Share and welcomePaul tells the church in Rome to "Share with the saints who are in need" and to "Practice hospitality".Romans 12:13
- 5Care for orphans and widowsJames calls it pure religion "to care for orphans and widows in their distress".James 1:27
- 6Keep meeting togetherHebrews says, "Let us not neglect meeting together, as some have made a habit, but let us encourage one another."Hebrews 10:25
- 7Stay among God's peopleProverbs warns, "He who isolates himself pursues selfish desires; he rebels against all sound judgment."Proverbs 18:1
Treat the church as family, Do good first to the family of faith, Share and welcome, Care for orphans and widows, Keep meeting together, Stay among God's people
Prayer for a lonely person goes together with a pastor's visits and, where loneliness has brought depression or illness, a doctor's care, and neither takes the place of the other.
The Hundredfold in This Age
Peter's word about leaving everything drew the promise from Jesus.
A rich man had gone away in sorrow because he had great wealth when Peter said to Jesus, "Look, we have left everything and followed You" (Mark 10:22; Mark 10:28).
Jesus' answer gives back every kind of kin that was left except the father, for Mark 10:29 names a father among those left and Mark 10:30 names none among those received. Mark 3:33 to 35 shows who the new brothers, sisters and mothers are, for Jesus looked at the people seated in a circle around Him.
Paul received such a mother himself, for he greets Rufus and "his mother, who has been a mother to me as well" (Romans 16:13).
The Household of God
The letters call the church God's household and give it charge of the widow and the stranger.
Therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household,Paul wrote it to Gentiles who had been outsiders to Israel, so the household this section describes takes in people who had none.
Paul gives Timothy rules for widows in 1 Timothy 5:3 to 16. Children and grandchildren care for their own widowed mothers first (1 Timothy 5:4). The church helps "the widows who are truly in need" (1 Timothy 5:16), and the widow who is "left all alone" puts her hope in God (1 Timothy 5:5).
The command to show hospitality to strangers in Hebrews 13:2 belongs to the value of hospitality.
The Early Church and Its Lonely
Acts and two early Christian writers describe the church's care for the poor, the orphan and the stranger.
Acts records that the first believers in Jerusalem shared their goods with anyone in need and broke bread from house to house (Acts 2:44 to 46; Acts 4:32 to 35).
The heading of Aristides' Apology says he made it before Hadrian the King. He wrote of the Christians that "from widows they do not turn away their esteem; and they deliver the orphan from him who treats him harshly". He added, "when they see a stranger, they take him in to their homes and rejoice over him as a very brother" (Apology, chapter 15).
Tertullian described the church's common fund in chapter 39 of his Apology. He wrote that the gifts went "to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house". He reported what outsiders said of the Christians: "See, they say, how they love one another".
The Words of the Household
Two Greek words name the household and the one left without it.
Oikeios, οἰκεῖος
3 uses in the canon
The adjective glossed "domestic, i.e. (as noun), a relative, adherent" names the members of a household.
Monoo, μονόω
1 use in the canon
The verb glossed "to isolate, i.e. bereave" describes the widow whom the Berean text calls left all alone.
The lexicon in full1 paragraph
Paul uses oikeios for the church in Galatians 6:10 and Ephesians 2:19 and for a man's own relatives in 1 Timothy 5:8, so one word covers the household of blood and the household of faith.
What the Hundredfold Is
Commentators from Cassian to Clarke read the promise of Mark 10:30 in three ways.
The hundredfold is the love of the brethrenJohn Cassian
John Cassian wrote of the one who leaves all for Christ in the twenty-fourth of his Conferences. Such a disciple, he wrote, receives a love from "the brethren and partners of his life, who are joined to him by a spiritual tie". That love, he wrote, comes "even in this life" and is "an hundred times better".
Against this reading, Mark 10:30 also names houses and fields among the things received.
The hundredfold is given in valueJohn Wesley and John Gill
John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, read the promise as "a hundred fold more happiness than any or all of these did or could afford". John Gill, in his Exposition of the New Testament, read it as a good "an hundred times better than any of the things mentioned".
Against this reading, the verse counts what is received by kind, as people and lands, where Wesley and Gill count it by worth.
The hundredfold is provision in this lifeAdam Clarke
Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible, paraphrased the promise as "my providence shall so work that nothing shall be lacking while any thing is necessary". He faulted those who "have said they are all to be understood spiritually".
Against this reading, Paul writes that he and the other apostles were homeless (1 Corinthians 4:11).
A Father of the Fatherless
A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in His holy habitation.The verse names God's own care for those who have lost their families, the people the church is told to take in.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- STEP Bible, Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament, the tagged text (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- STEP Bible TBESG lexicon (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0, with the definitions of James Strong, Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (1890)
- Aristides, Apology, chapter 15, translated by D. M. Kay, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, ed. Allan Menzies (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1896)
- Tertullian, Apology, chapter 39, translated by S. Thelwall, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885)
- John Cassian, Conference 24, chapter 26, translated by C. S. Gibson, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 11, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894)
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on Mark 10:30.
- John Gill, Exposition of the New Testament (1746 to 1748), on Mark 10:30.
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Mark 10:30.
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