Jesus' Take on Family Values

We’ve been hearing lots of talk about family lately.

In the USA, the nomination of a new Supreme Court judge has prompted talk of family values. The detainment and separation of migrant families has done the same. In Canada, the announcement of compensation for those harmed by the Sixties and Seventies Scoop has raised questions about Canada’s treatment of Indigenous families. And then, of course, there is the more banal talk of family vacations and weddings that each summer brings.

With all this talk of family, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at Jesus’ unique vision of family values.

He armed them with a Bible and sent them to do a little research on Jesus and ‘family values’.

John L. Bell tells the story of an exercise he led at a conference. He divided everyone into three groups, armed them with a Bible, and sent them to do a little research on Jesus and ‘family values’.

The first group went to look for examples of good family values among the patriarchs and heroes of Jesus’ Jewish ancestry. What did they find?

Well, there’s Abraham, who passed his wife off as his sister to save his own hide. And Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who did the same thing, but only after duping his brother and father into giving him the family inheritance.

A long time after these patriarchs, there’s David, who commits adultery with the wife of a loyal soldier, who he then schemes to have killed in battle. Solomon should have known a lot about family, since he had 700 wives and 300 concubines. But he was hardly an example either.

There’s Abraham, who passed his wife off as his sister to save his own hide.

There are, of course, better examples of family life in Jesus’ ancestry, but they seem to be happy exceptions rather than the rule.

So much for group one.

A second group went to look at the relationship Jesus had with his own family, as recorded in the gospels, to see what good family values they could find.

Not much help there either.

Jesus’ life began with an unwed girl becoming pregnant and her fiancé who was ready to turn and run.

Jesus’ life began with an unwed girl becoming pregnant and her fiancé who--after learning she was pregnant–was ready to turn and run.

And then, of course, there is the famous passage in which Jesus’ family asks to see him outside of a crowded home. Jesus turns to the crowd and says ‘Who are my brothers and sisters? Not those folks waiting for me outside, but those who do God’s will!’

Ouch.

Jesus’ direct teaching about family and relationships is hardly the stuff of feel-good family sitcoms.

The third group in John Bell’s little experiment looked at Jesus’ own words about the family. But Jesus’ direct teaching about family and relationships is hardly the stuff of feel-good family sitcoms. ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple.’

Yikes.

So what’s going on with Jesus’ approach to the family? Well, a couple of things, I think.

First, the harsh words of Jesus - like “if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children” - must be heard in the light of Jesus’ invitation to follow him into God’s coming kingdom of newness, and the inevitable tension that will come from marching to a different beat, a beat that not everyone around us will hear. We won’t be able to say that we weren’t warned beforehand that it will not always be easy, even, or especially, with those closest to us.

There is something else going on with Jesus’ teachings on family.

But, second, there is something else going on with Jesus’ teachings on family. Jesus lived and taught in a time and place where poverty and disease were common, among the old and the young, as the early death of Lazarus and the healing of Jairus’ daughter and the centurion’s young servant show.

The majority of people in Jesus’ world would not live to see the age of 40, and many died in their teenage years. There were many communities where there were children with no parents to provide stability and economic security, parents with no children to care for them as they aged and no partners to provide friendship.

It is into this situation of pain and vulnerability that Jesus initiated a new community of belonging.

Jesus insists in Mark 3 that those who do God’s will are his family. Jesus teaches his followers to pray ‘Our Father’, hinting at a new family not based on blood but on our response to God’s claim on us. At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, ‘I am going to my Father, and to your Father.’

It is into this situation of pain and vulnerability that Jesus initiated a new community of belonging.

Jesus initiates a new family, just as he invites us into a new kingdom.

Those who are allied to Jesus did not just enter into a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ but entered into new family relationships with everyone else gathered into God’s reign.

What good news to Jesus’ time . . . and to our own.

When I lived in Vancouver I was part of a place called Jacob’s Well, which befriended folks on the margins in that inner city. Jacob’s Well members would visit folks in the many run-down rooming houses in the neighbourhood, bringing some food baskets and spending an afternoon sipping coffee.

One of the people the Jacob’s Well community befriended was on older man who had immigrated on his own from Eastern Europe. Through a long and complicated journey, he ended up in Vancouver’s inner city, where he lived alone. After we befriended him, he became sick and ended up dying alone in the hospital, visited only by his new Jacob’s Well friends.

The doctor took our friend Helen aside after he died and told her something that I’ve always remembered: that our friend died not from medical complications or old age or natural causes . . . he died from loneliness.

Loneliness.

My guess is that he is not the only person who has died from loneliness.

After spending a lot of time over the last 8 years in Canada’s prisons, my guess is that he is not the only person who has died from loneliness. Jesus’ news of a new family - a Kingdom family of hope - is as important now as it ever was. Maybe more.

Did Jesus initiate this new family of baptism just to address the social ills of  his time or ours? I don’t think so. There are deeper, more sacramental reasons to join this new community of the baptised.

But I wonder if Jesus also knew that the traditional mom, dad, and 2.5 kids sort of family is not mandatory or even possible for everyone. In a broken world, there are so many who do not fit into the idealized family unit on offer in many Christian circles.

And that is just fine, because those who belong to Jesus also belong to each other. As John Bell puts it, “Jesus invites people into a larger family which is defined by commitment to the Kingdom of God.”

Those who belong to Jesus also belong to each other.

This new family of belonging that Jesus initiates . . .

• …is the kind of belonging that I saw in Ugandan churches where elderly women take in boys and girls orphaned by HIV/AIDS and care for them as if they were their own.
• …is the kind of belonging I saw in Edmonton’s inner city when folks offered former inmates a second chance by welcoming them to their dinner table.
• …is the kind of belonging we see when churches welcome desperate people labelled as ‘outsiders’ or ‘illegals’ into their churches and advocate for them in the public square.
• …is the kind of belonging we see when families take in young children that may have otherwise have been abandoned.

It is the kind of belonging we see all too rarely in our churches, but when we to see it, we know we are seeing a glimpse of God’s kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

[Image: Caleb Jones on Unsplash]