Jesus' Focus on the Family (Proper 27C)

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Twentieth-fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
10 November 2013--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In the hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs:  Elena and me and our four children in group poses over the years, our parents, siblings, our children’s cousins, our grandchildren.    On occasion guests comment “What a lovely family!”  Elena and I smile politely in return.  For thankful as we are for our family and all the happy memories, we realize the photographs tell only part of a complicated story.  

We don’t hang some pictures because they are just too painful: those taken at funerals or during episodes of mental illness of some family member, during estranged feelings, or after suicides, 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 their own careers, the idealized family was a club with which patriarchs and church leaders could beat them down.  The brutality was disguised by gentle, earnest “loving” voices, and gentle hymns extolling family harmony and conformity to gender and sexual norms.

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 millions of people struggling for happier, better lives by seeking direction from what Dobson claims to be the teachings of the Bible. 

Unfortunately, the Bible is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You only 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 in 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.  But it is a key text in seeing what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

Theological opponents approach Jesus.  They are Sadducees, members of the priestly class.  They are conservatives—they accept only the Torah as scripture—and are suspicious of the later prophetic and wisdom writings and such new-fangled ideas as life after death.  

They pose Jesus a trick question: seven brothers die in sequence, each marrying the deceased brother’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, 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 at this time had three completely different takes on 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 and the Community’s ascetic practices 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. 

The Pharisees too believed that the Law brought order to the messiness of life, but were more optimistic about life than the Saduccees while rejecting 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 close to the Pharisees here: 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—Jesus was a wedding guest at Cana.  His first miracle was helping make the party a success by turning water into wine.    In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned” marriage as a “manner of life.”   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. 

The Sadducees are assuming here that marriage as they know it, affirmed in scripture and tradition, cannot change:  How can a resurrection exist when it might mean that a woman belongs to several men at once? 

Jesus corrects their error head-on by noting 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 this age we make exploitative contracts and establish unfair relationships of subordination, even endorsed by scripture.  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 claims, this is not a prohibition about calling a priest “father” or “mother.”  It is not about titles.  It is about real life fathers. It is Jesus’ teaching on family, and all relationships:  even families aren’t absolute, even fathers are in some ways defective when contrasted with the True Father.   God and the life to come are the true pattern of relationships.

In Mark 3, Jesus’ Mother and brothers think Jesus has gone mad.  They ask him to abandon his mission and return home.  His reply is biting:  “Who are my mother and my brothers?  Not you, but those who follow God along with me—they are my true family!” 

In all of this, Jesus suggests that our earthly relationships—no matter how good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true human relationships God created us for, and has in store for us.   Jesus’ teaching here is not that in the afterlife people are celibate or neutered, or human relationships cease. His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better as God’s kingdom comes.   Life will then match what it was created for, and not be mixed with the painful distortions we see here. 

His point is that if our relationship with God is right, all the other ones will take care of themselves.  If it is wrong, the other relationships are in question.

Jesus says we must reexamine our assumptions about society, including scripture, 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 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 birth, life, death, and resurrection are all about.   Incarnation as a doctrine teaches us that all human life is redeemable.   

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.  We try to do our best, and must hope for God’s saving act.  On occasion in our moments of mutual support and love, of cozy familiarity and even intimacy, we see glimpses of God’s ultimate good intentions for us. 

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.