Jesus' Focus on the Family (proper 27c)

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
10 November 2019--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 over the years, our parents, siblings, cousins, 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 or drug and alcohol relapse of some family member, during estranged feelings, or after suicides, divorces, tragic accidents, and illness.  

I understand about idealizing the family.  I was raised in a religious tradition that celebrated an idealized, romanticized family, patriarchal and conservative. One of my mother’s favorite hymns used these images to describe it:

“In the cottage there is joy
When there’s love at home;
Hate and envy ne’er annoy
When there's love at home.
Roses bloom beneath our feet;
All the earth's a garden sweet,
Making life a bliss complete
When there's love at home.”

When I asked her once how she could stand such a saccharine picture, she replied, “Well of course that’s not how families ARE.  But it’s how I WISH they were!” 

That ideal had a nasty business edge.  When women wanted an equal say, the idealized family was a club with which patriarchs could beat them down.  The brutality was disguised by gentle, earnest “loving” voices, and such maudlin sentimentality extolling family and conformity to gender and sexual norms.

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. 

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 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.  

They ask: 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 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 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 and food. 

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 relationship, 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, 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 and toxic hierarchy. 

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.