Jesus’ Focus on the Family
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
6 November 2022—8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17;
Luke 20:27-38
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
In the culture wars over sexuality
and marriage, some people often say that they support the “Biblical view of
marriage.” When I hear that, I often
wonder what Bible they have been reading, since so many different forms of
marriage are discussed and endorsed in different parts of the Bible: a nuclear
family and couple of a man and a woman (Gen. 2:24), polygamy with one man and
several wives or broader polygyny including concubines and slaves, whether your
own or your wives’ (Genesis; Judges; 1-2 Kings), levirate marriage to produce
offspring for a dead brother (Gen. 36:6-10), forced marriage between a rapist
and his victim (Deut. 22:28-29), and even simply the act of forcible rape of
women in war as “spoils of war” (Numbers 31:1-18; Deut. 21:11-14). All of these marriage forms discussed and
endorsed in parts of the Bible are based on the idea of the woman as the
chattel possession of the man.
Now I admit that idealizing the
family is big business. Witness over the years the success of
“Little House on the Prairies,” “Father Knows Best,” “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.
But the Bible even at its best is
not a particularly good place to find idealized families. You only have
to read it to realize how messy and twisted families can be. If you
idealize the patriarchal family, just look at the horror stories in the
families of the patriarchs themselves: hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and
murder all appear.
Rarely do people who claim to
promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel
reading. But it is key in seeing what
Jesus’ actual view of the matter was.
Opponents approach Jesus: Sadducees,
conservatives who accept only the Torah as scripture and are wary of later
prophetic and wisdom writings and their new-fangled ideas like life after
death.
In order to make a point for their conservative
denial of life after death, they pose a hypothetical question of property: seven brothers die in sequence, each marrying
the deceased brother’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the
Torah. “If there is a resurrection from the dead, to whom does that woman
belong?” For them, wives and children
have the status of property. Women can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time,
though men can ‘own’ several wives. Since this woman clearly can’t belong
to all seven, the resurrection is an impossibility, rather like a dirty
joke.
Jesus replies: “She belongs to
none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. All belong to
God alone.”
The three great branches of Judaism
at this time had completely different takes on the messiness of life and
prospects for life after death.
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 rule
of life 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 Sadducees of today’s reading
believed that the Law controlled life’s messiness, but 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 life’s messiness, but rejected the asceticism of the
Essenes and the reluctance of the Sadducees to accept immortality and
resurrection. They were this-life
affirming and future-life
affirming.
Jesus, close to the Pharisees here,
affirms both this world and the world to come. “Being as the angels in
heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is not an expression of
ascetic contempt for the body and marriage. Remember that story about
Jesus turning water into wine at that wedding in Cana. 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, beer, and good food.
You see, Jesus accepted—indeed,
reveled in!—life in all its messiness,
but didn’t lose hope for something better.
Part of the problem is we idealize things and pretend the messy parts
don’t exist—another way of not affirming this present life. 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!” I smile politely in
return. That collection of pictures is carefully curated! 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, when a loved one was in prison, during estranged feelings, or
after suicides, divorces, tragic accidents and grim degenerative illnesses.
But all this is part of real life. And
accepting and loving life means bearing this brokenness with grace as well.
For Jesus, God’s love is revealed in
the differences between this life and
life in the age to come. This age is messed up, the age to come, fully in
accord with God’s will. Here, we make exploitative contracts and unfair
subordinating relationships, including marriage. Men take wives as
chattel. But in the age to come, there will be a radical equality: no exploitation, privilege, or abuse. Only one subordination will exist, the one
that binds each person equally to God: “[They] neither marry nor are given in
marriage... because they are like angels and are children of God.”
“In the resurrection all will have
God as father”: 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). This is not a prohibition of
calling a priest “father” or “mother.” It is not about titles. It is about real-life fathers. For Jesus families
aren’t absolute, and even good fathers are defective when contrasted with the True
Father.
In Mark 3, Jesus’ Mother and
brothers think Jesus has gone mad, and 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 relationships God created us for.
Some people today, triggered by
experience of abusive patriarchy, object to Jesus’ way of referring to God:
“father,” abba, or “Papa.” Jesus clearly
is not saying God is a biological male or our parent in any literal sense. Elsewhere, Jesus uses feminine images for
God: a nursing mother, a brooding hen.
All the same, he tells us to pray, “Our father.”
I find it curious that the people
who are most quick to urge us to always use peoples’ preferred names, titles,
and pronouns at times seem to be the most resistant to using the designation
for God that Jesus gives us:
Father. Granted, its use may be
merely an artifact of the patriarchal culture in which the Bible was
written. And granted, its use can be a
trigger for some. But Jesus uses the
image again and again, even as he deconstructs oppression, patriarchy, and
toxic hierarchy.
Admittedly, expansive and inclusive
language in our worship and our God-talk is necessary to break down
patriarchy’s abusive oppression. But we
should not let our own triggers and justice agendas become obstacles to hearing
what Jesus is teaching us here: that our relationship to God is like the
relationship of a child to the best of all possible fathers: intimate, loving,
and fully trusting.
Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is
not that in the afterlife people are celibate or neutered, or
that human relationships, including families, cease. His point is that all of
life that we know will be changed for the
better in the world to come. Life
will then fully embody what we were created for, and not be diminished and
twisted by the brokenness we have come to see as normal.
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
the God whom he called abba. It’s not
just what Jesus taught. It is what his
birth, life, death, and resurrection are all about. Incarnation demands that we see that all
human life is redeemable.
So what part of family life and
relationships will endure? Not the nasty bits, to be sure. I suspect we will be very, very pleasantly
surprised by what God actually has in store. Whatever it is exactly, we
can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison.
The fact is, no family is “normal”
or ideal. We try our best to muddle
along, and trust in God’s love and healing power. On occasion in moments of mutual support and
love, of cozy familiarity and even intimacy, we see glimpses of God’s ultimate
good intentions for us. And these
glimpses are sweet indeed.
Thanks be to God.
