Romans 6.1b-11, Matthew 10.24-39
Trinity 1, 22 June 2014, Queen Camel (Together at Ten)
‘I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household’ [1]
Sometimes scripture comforts us; and sometimes it is so uncomfortable that we’d rather avoid what it says. But if we are to grow in our faith and to present a faithful, mature version of Christianity to the world then we need to grapple with these difficult texts, trusting God to reveal himself to us through our struggle. So why did Jesus say those things about the family which we have heard today?
We might assume, before looking, that the scriptures would affirm family values. But then we start to look and we see something different altogether. From the very beginning in scripture, family is a forum for conflict and pain. The first couple Adam and Eve conflicted over a secret and a lie; the first nuclear family blown apart when Cain kills his brother Abel through jealousy. Later, more sibling rivalry as Jacob tricks his brother Esau out of his inheritance. The sisters Leah and Rachel compete for the love of Jacob; and Joseph's brothers are so jealous that they effectively sell him into slavery. [2] We could go on through to the end of the New Testament finding many more examples, even from Jesus’ own family, whose relationships were far from blissful or straightforward.
And conflicts between families are common in scripture too. Joseph’s brothers became the twelve tribes of Israel and after Solomon’s death they divided into two kingdoms, from then on often at war with each other. In the wider culture families would expel members who had in some way sullied themselves and thus the family name - in that society outcasts included those with incurable diseases, those who had fallen into poverty and unpayable debt.
Families, then, were always at war with themselves and others. But ironically, they were also regarded as society’s anchor. In the ancient world family loyalty was a universally recognised obligation; family loyalty was a major symbol of Jewish identity. Family loyalty was at the cultural and religious heart of the society to which Jesus belonged. Family was seen as holding society together - but scripture revealed the unpalatable reality, that in the normal way of things, families have a habit of falling apart. [3]
Looking at today’s world, does that sound familiar? You will each know of stories about families at war internally, families fighting other families, people cast out of families for stepping out of line. In poor inner-city parishes and in compact rural villages I’ve seen clan conflicts at work first hand, tearing communities apart. We all know the image of the vicious gangster who could, an instant after a merciless beating of someone who’d crossed him, could take flowers to his beloved old Mum, who he dotes on: it’s a stereotype based on a deep reality. And to those stories of people being forever excluded when they marry someone of whom their family disapproves, we may add the more subtle and gradual exclusion experienced by people with creeping dementia, finding as the affliction develops and their memories of the family fade, so the family forgets to include them, fails to visit, leaves them - in their neediest time - alone. [4]
So Jesus distanced himself from society’s so-called Family Values. He would not make an idol of the family, as the rest of society had. Time and time again in the gospels we hear him make statements like, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’ [5] or ‘There is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.’ [6] And today’s incendiary remarks,
‘Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.’ [7]
Now rather like the times we live in, in Jesus’ era also, in a nation under occupation, all the institutions of our culture were being challenged, changed, under attack. Family and religion especially. Given his peaceable nature, given his healing mission, Jesus’ followers expected him to bring peace to the troubled family of Israel. How shocking then, to them, when he tells them that he will do the opposite.
‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. [8]
Jesus, who his friends saw as one who expressed love and care for those closest to him, here throws a grenade into the heart of the family home. In the light of this passage, the concept of Christian Family Values is blown apart.
So what on earth does Jesus mean by these words?
First of all, a couple of statements about what his teaching on the family is not.
It is not a denial of family values, but a call to ‘sit loose’ to them in giving greater priority to being a baptised citizen of God’s kingdom.
It is not a reversal of family values, but an invitation to apply the best of them in a new way of human relating.
Jesus’ concern was not to undermine or deny the value of the family; but his chief concern was to announce the coming of the kingdom of God.
The reason he did what he did and said what he said was that he read the signs of the times, believed the kingdom was now dawning in and through his own work, and realised that some of the symbols of Israel’s worldview had become tainted, stained, even redundant.
He made his point strongly in order to ensure it was heard - that whilst there will obviously be a place for the family in the future of God’s people, they must not make an idol of it, and they must be prepared to reshape it in the light of the values of God’s kingdom. A few years later Paul saw this clearly. The baptised are not a family - they have died to the old ways of the world, family ties included. The baptised are a people exploring a new way to be human together, with God:
Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. [9]
The Baptised are not a family - our relationships transcend so-called family values.
Families are alive to each other, exclusively; the baptised are alive to God - which is an all-inclusive, all-embracing aliveness.
Now, this revelation transformed the lives of those who were baptised into Christ’s way, his followers after his Ascension. They remembered Jesus’ practice of sharing fellowship meals with moral outcasts such as the tax-collectors Levi and Zaccheus. Shockingly, for his day, these meals included women, among them a so-called ‘sinful women’ who, in the house of a leading Pharisee, anointed Jesus with ‘an alabaster jar of perfume’; meals also shared with - and often provided by - people who were not outcasts - leading Pharisees; many of his meals paid for by wealthy supporters such as Joanna. Jesus’ fellowship meals brought together devout Jews and the ‘outcasts and sinners’ and the poor of the land, and in that way deeply challenged the divisive social and religious conventions of the time. [10] And so the early disciples, the newly-baptised, followed this form of community. ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common,’ Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles. [11]
The Baptised are not a family - our relationships transcend family values. Even the world can see this. The prominent British literary theorist and public intellectual Terry Eagleton recently wrote,
The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. ... but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. [12]
Baptism means dying to our adherence to institutions which crush and deny the Spirit, and opening ourselves to new ways of being together. Being baptised doesn’t remove us from the mess of human living - including the sometimes messy business of family life - but it brings us together with people in new ways. And when you introduce new ways into the world, some will respond joyfully - but others will fight you. Which is why Jesus foresaw conflict in families for those who chose to follow him. That’s what he meant by not bringing peace but a sword, by setting family members against each other. Christianity proposes such radical ways of doing things that those trapped in the old ways will reject it violently.
In his wonderful little book, Being Christian, Rowan Williams puts it this way: ‘You don’t go down to into the rivers of Jordan without stirring up a great deal of mud!’ [13]
He goes on to say,
What ... do you expect to see in the baptised? An openness to human need, but also a corresponding openness to the Holy Spirit. In the life of baptised people there is a constant rediscovering, re-enacting of the Father’s embrace of Jesus in the Holy Spirit [at his baptism in the River Jordan]. The baptised person is not only in the middle of human suffering and muddle but in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That surely is one of the most extraordinary mysteries of being Christian. We are in the middle of two things that seem quite contradictory: in the middle of the heart of God, the ecstatic joy of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in the middle of a world of threat, suffering, sin and pain. And because Jesus had taken his stand right in the middle of those two realities, that is where we take ours. ‘Where I am, there will my servant be also’ (John 12.26). [14]
The Baptised are not a family - we are people in relationship with God, with other believers who may be in some ways quite different from us, from all walks of life, and especially the baptised are people who follow Jesus in embracing the poorest, the neediest, those whom society and its families have rejected.
We, the Baptised, are placed in this world to remember the forgotten ones, to include the excluded ones, to bring peace to the conflicted ones, to visit the unvisited ones, to nurture life and love and hope where family and society has failed to deliver these things. Like our Lord, breaking down barriers, transcending boundaries, muddying the waters in joyous activity - these are the marks of the Baptised, to whom we belong, and what a way of life it is.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. [15]
Notes
[1] Matthew 10.35-36
[2] Wikipedia: Sibling rivalry - in religion
[3] N.T. Wright in his discussion of Nation and Family in Jesus and the Victory of God, pp.383-407, from a previous sermon on which this one draws, Christian Family Values - an incendiary approach, preached in Cheshire in 2013.
[4] I’m indebted to John Swinton, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God, for his detailed and thoughtful discussion of this and other pastoral aspects of the affliction.
[5] Luke 8.19-21
[6] Luke 18.29
[7] Matthew 10.37-38
[8] Matthew 10.34-36
[9] Romans 6.4
[10] From my earlier sermon, Placed among the poor, Bratton Clovelly, 17/3/2013, and also Christian Family Values - an incendiary approach.
[11] Acts 2.44
[12] Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God
[13] Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.6
[14] Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.7
[15] Romans 6.5
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