Jesus’ Focus on the Family
Homily Delivered at Spoken Eucharists 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.
Morrison Chapel Macau
7 November 2010
Proper 27C
Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5; Luke 20:27(28-33)34-38; Psalm 17
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
In the main hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs: my wife and me and our four children in group poses over the years, our parents and brothers and sisters and their families, two marriages of children, cousins, grandchildren. Often guests comment on what a lovely family we have, picture perfect. My wife and I smile politely in return, and say little. For thankful as we are for our family and for each other, and for all the happy memories these photographs summarize, we realize the pictures capture only single moments and single threads of complicated stories.
Our guests don’t realize that there are pictures not shown because they are just too painful. Some risk setting off a scene were they to be seen by some visiting family members. Those not shown include ones taken close to deaths in the family, during episodes of mental illness of some family members, at funerals, or after the suicides of cousins and nephews, divorces, tragic accidents and illnesses.
I understand about idealizing the family. I was raised in a religious tradition that celebrated an idealized, romanticized family, patriarchal and conservative. As in our hallway, often the ideal image was but a sanitized caricature of real families. When women wanted equal say, or to have their own careers, the idealized family served as a club with which patriarchs and church leaders could beat them down. The brutality of this was disguised by gentle, earnest “priesthood voices,” and the gentle playing of hymns extolling family love in the background.
Idealizing the family is big business. Witness over the years the success of American television programs “Little House on the Prairies,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.” The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” Ministry attracts every week millions of people struggling for happier, better lives and seeking direction on what it says is the Bible’s teaching’s on the family.
Unfortunately, the Bible is not a particularly good place to find idealized families. You just have to read it to realize how messy and twisted human families can be, and have always been. If you think a patriarchal family is an ideal, just look at the horror stories told in Genesis about the families of the patriarchs themselves. Hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear in those hallowed chapters.
Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading, though it is a key text in trying to see what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was.
Theological opponents of Jesus approach and ask him a question. They are Sadducees, members of the priestly class known for their strict constructionist reading of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and their unwillingness to accept other books as scripture or entertain theological ideas not explicitly expressed there. As a result, they do not believe in any life after death, since this idea is explicitly found only in later prophetic and wisdom writings.
Their question has seven brothers dying in sequence, each marrying the first’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah. “If there is such a thing as a resurrection from the dead,” they ask Jesus, “to whom does the woman belong when they all come forth in this resurrection?” For them marriage is a bond relationship, where wives and children have the status of property. In their patriarchal society, a woman can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives. Thus she clearly can’t belong to all seven. The resurrection is therefore an impossibility, and something akin to a dirty joke.
Jesus replies by simply denying the underlying premise of the question: “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. They all belong to God.”
The three great branches of Judaism in Palestine at this time had three completely different takes on the question of the messiness of life, the prospects for a future life after death, and the relationship between these.
The Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated. They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah, the Community Rule, and its ascetic practices (including celibacy), would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness. They were this-life denying but future-life affirming.
The Saduccees, the ones in today’s reading, believed that the Law controlled the messiness associated with life. But they rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body. Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!” The Sadducees would have agreed. They were this-life affirming but future-life denying. Believing as they did that life’s messiness was incompatible with an ideal perfect future life, they denied the existence of any such ideal.
The Pharisees also believed that the Law brought order to the messiness of life, but were generally more optimistic about life in general and rejected the asceticism of the Essenes. They accepted both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming.
Jesus is closer to the Pharisees than to the Essenes and the Sadducees: he affirms this world as well as the world to come. You might think his language about “being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is some kind of Essene contempt for the body and marriage per se. But this is a misunderstanding.
Remember that in John 2, Jesus shows up at the wedding at Cana and plays his appropriate role as a wedding guest, even to the point of helping all his fellow guests enjoy the party by miraculously creating copious amounts of wine from water. In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned this manner of life,” marriage. He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic. He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine and food.
His response to the Sadducees here stems from a key element of how Jesus saw the world, one where he differed from the Pharisees on a crucial point: how to distinguish between the good and the bad that is mixed together in this life, and what in this life would remain in the life to come and what would be burned away in the great Day of the Lord.
Jesus refused to use the distinction between clean and unclean, or between conventional and abnormal, as the dividing line. Rather, he used almost exclusively how we treat one another, the distinction between just and unjust, between acting fairly and unfairly. “First seek God’s reign and the justice it requires, and everything else will take care of itself” he says in one place (Matt 6:33). “Unless your justice exceeds that of the Pharisees and the scribes, you are not fit for God’s reign” he says in another (Matt 5:20).
His opponents criticized his noticeable laxity in respecting differences in the Torah between clean and unclean. His desire to help those most in need of his message led to accusations that he spent all his time in unclean settings, with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors (disloyal traitors working for foreign invaders).
Within this larger context of affirmation of this life, liberalism on matters of ritual purity, and strong criticism of social injustice, we see the logic behind his answer to the Sadducees’ question on the resurrection.
The Sadducees assume that marriage and family are key constituents of what it means to be human and alive and that marriage as they knew it was the only kind of marriage there can ever be. They see that the religious framework of marriage—the Leviticus clause about marrying your dead brother’s childless widow—as unchanging. So marriage’s messiness, religion’s messiness, indeed life’s messiness is for them incompatible with any perfect realm. That is a major reason behind their denial of the resurrection of the body and immortality of the soul.
But Jesus corrects the error head-on. Where the messiness and contingency of life in this world make it hard for the Sadducees to imagine any of it lasting beyond death, Jesus focuses on the differences between this life and life in the age to come. This age is messed up, but the age to come is ordered in accordance with the creator’s will. This age is riddled with injustice and wrong; the age to come has justice flowing like a river.
In specific reply to their question on marriage, he says that in this age we make exploitative contracts and establish unfair relationships of subordination. Men take wives as chattel (that’s what the word “marry” means in this context) and women are taken as chattel (“are given in marriage”). But in the age to come, in the resurrection, there will be a radical equality. There will be no exploitative contracts or relationships. Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person to God: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”
“In the resurrection all will have God as father,” he says, and this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage. Elsewhere, Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9). Contrary to later radical Protestant readings, this is not a prohibition about calling a priest “father.” It is about real life fathers. Jesus is saying even families aren’t absolute, even fathers are in some ways defective when contrasted with the True Father.
Jesus acted this out as well. In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting like a normal, obedient son after he began his public ministry. They think he has gone insane by abandoning his family. In reply, Jesus publicly breaks with his family and says “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”
For Jesus, what separates this world from the way it is supposed to be is injustice and alienation from God and each other. The true pattern, sometimes imperfectly but joyously reflected here, lies in the Age to Come. We should not mistake the distortions, the twisting, the messiness of that pattern we see in this life for the true pattern. We should not, like the Sadducees, deny that a true pattern exists.
C.S. Lewis makes a great point about the contrast between “the real thing” and poor substitutes: if the only thing we know is a poor substitute, or a distorted shadow, when we actually run into the real thing we may think it strange, and perhaps mark it as the poor substitute. He tells a story from his youth—stealing cigarettes from his father’s stash. Occasionally when the cigarettes were so few that even one might be missed, he dipped into his father’s plentiful cigar stash, which he kept only for honored guests. He says that he and a friend thought “poor us, today we’ll have to put up with cigars when we might have had cigarettes!”
In saying “call no one father,” Jesus suggests that earthly fathers—no matter how good, how loving, and how wise—are poor substitutes for our Father in Heaven. In contrasting chattel marriage here and its absence in the resurrection, he is suggesting that our earthly families—no matter who good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true human relationships God created us for, and has in store for us. Even our gender is perhaps a dim, distorted echo of the brilliantly sharp distinctions of personality of those who enjoy the beatific vision of God.
Thus, Jesus here does not teach that the resurrection is celibate, or that people there are neutered. He does not say that human relationships are excluded from the next life. His point is not that human relationships are all bad, something to be gotten rid of. His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better as God’s kingdom comes, when His will is done on earth as in heaven. Life will then match what it was created for, and not be mixed with the painful distortions we see here.
His point is that the most important relationship is the one we have with God. If that is right, all the other ones will take care of themselves. If it is wrong, the other relationships are doomed.
Jesus in this story says clearly that exploitation, injustice, and unfairness are totally excluded from the age to come. This means that we must reexamine our assumptions about society, including marriage and family. In opening our hearts to God, in emptying ourselves to God’s fullness, we need God to lead us to more just relationships. Jesus here is not saying that the world is wholly evil and corrupt, and that marriage, and love, and families are mere passing ills, destined to be jettisoned along with our evil bodies as we leave in death this world of sin. He is saying that in this world, all things are admixtures of good and ill, and if they are to endure in the age to come, must be transformed, starting now.
Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in a God who acts to save his creatures. And it’s not just his teaching It is what his life, death, and resurrection are about.
So what part of family life and relationships will endure? I personally think that hope for such on our part is demanded by Jesus’ affirmation of this life. But I also think we will be very, very surprised by what God actually has in store for us. Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison.
The fact is, there is no family that is “normal,” no family that is ideal, just as there is no such thing as a perfect human being, or a “saint” who has no failings or disabilities. Last Monday was All Saints’ Day, the day where we celebrate the link between us and the society of the age to come, the community shared between the faithful living and the faithful dead, the communion of saints. A saint is not a person without failings and disappointments. A saint is a person burdened with such disabilities who nevertheless in faith and hope perseveres despite them.
This week in our prayers, I hope that we can all reflect in silence about eternity and the life to come, about the true image of humanity and human relations yet to be revealed. May this image be a balm to the images of the sick humanity we see in the mirror and lock away in unseen photo albums. I pray that the hope generated by such a vision enlivens our faith, makes us strive harder for justice now in how we treat others, especially those most dear to us, and keeps our eyes fixed on the real family that Jesus invites us to focus on.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
Morrison Chapel, Macau
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