Last week I was reading a newspaper article on family values. The gist of the article was that everyone wants strong family values but few can agree on what they are. Then I heard Roger Rosenblatt on public radio being cynical about family values. Rosenblatt said that there are plenty of perfect families around like yours and mine. But, there are so many others that fall short, families like the Walker spy family or the Medicis in Italy or the Macbeths of Scotland or the Oedipus Rexes of Greece. Rosenblatt's point was that there is no perfect family and that family values have become so generalized they are meaningless. He said what is valuable in families is that they are normal people struggling to do good and be good, strengthening themselves by listening to each other, paying attention to other families, and encouraging each other to be fair, honest, and kind. Sounds like a decent list of family values to me, and even a single parent can do those things.
Some of us, when we think of family, think of more ordinary things, like clusters of dog hair on clothes and hot dogs with everything smushed in the glove compartment and peanut butter on the television screen and aging grease on the hood over the stove. Whatever your view of the family and its values might be, Jesus wrecks it all. Jesus' words are like answering the doorbell and getting a bucket of ice water in the face.
Reports coming to Jesus' family make them think he might be losing his mind. Jesus has been performing remarkable healings. Great crowds have gathered, and everyone is talking about him. The Bible says he was so busy there was no time for meals. The scribes were saying that Jesus' power to heal comes from demons, therefore he must be possessed. His family is understandably worried. You and I know that it is not a demon that drives Jesus, but the Spirit of God. Apparently, his family didn't know. It is sad that his mother and brothers, who should be closest to him, do not understand. Jesus says his true family are those who do understand and do the will of God. This is an explosive statement! Jesus is threatening the most fundamental of structures, the human family. Blood ties mean nothing, nor do family values. According to Jesus what really unites us is spirit and truth.
Jesus' family is concerned about him. They come to take him away, back to the family fold for protection and rest and recovery. This is just what he does not need. Jesus has been steadily moving away from his family since the age of twelve. That was when he escaped from Mary and Joseph to meet with the teachers in the temple. His frantic parents — who had been searching for him — scolded him. Jesus responded by calling the temple "his Father's house" (Luke 2:49b). (I wonder if his parents understood what he was saying. I wonder if Joseph's feeling were hurt.) The gap between Jesus and his parents became even more clear when he was an adult and said things like: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). Jesus was not speaking about family values here. He's speaking about what happens to family loyalty when people are asked to put God first. When someone says to Jesus, "Lord, first let me go bury my father" (Luke 9:59), he said, "No." Someone else said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home" (Luke 9:61). Again, he said, "No." Clearly, loyalty to God comes before anything else. It's a matter of life and death, though you might have to stand in Jesus' sandals to see it that way. Jesus valued his family. It's just that he valued something else more. Jesus loved his family, but he loved something else more. Jesus affirms the family and then limits its significance.
Some of us know how difficult it was to become independent from our parents. We all go through some kind of separation from parents in the process of finding ourselves. Later in life, when our parents are gone, we find we are still separating from our image of them. But revolting against family is not freedom. Revolt just subjects us to another kind of law. Paul Tillich, the theologian, put it like this: "What is necessary finally is dependence on that which gives ultimate independence."1 Our goal is to depend on God.
For Jesus, family is not about genetics and who raised us. It's about the image in which we are created. Family is not about the town you came from or the house you grew up in, but whether the people there served the same God. This gives us all a very, very large family, the family we were baptized into. It was at our child's baptism we learned that our child is first God's child and then our own. Baptism sets limits on parenting and expands our definition of family to include all nations, all ages, all conditions of human existence, and all the others for whom God is Father.
Some of us grew up watching the afternoon television program, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Others of us may be reluctant to admit that we sat down with our children and watched it, too. I think Mr. Rogers exemplified in a gentle way what Jesus was getting at. When Mr. Rogers changed into his sweater and took off his shoes, it was a biblical gesture of self-emptying humility and welcome to all of us in TV land. Then he sang the litany we loved to hear, "It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be mine? Could you be mine?" Even Mr. McFeely, the postal carrier, went around from house to house making a neighborhood out of what would have been a bunch of separate houses divided by hedges and picket fences. The family values we saw in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood were courtesy and kindness and curiosity. In one episode, Mr. Rogers took us to a sneaker factory where there was an assembly line of workers. He watched one woman working, and he wondered out loud if she ever thought about the people who would wear the shoes she made. The values of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood came right through that television screen into our family room. That woman making sneakers became my neighbor as well as the unknown people buying the shoes she made.
You and I may differ on definitions of family and what constitutes family values, but we all know we can learn something indispensable from Jesus. He teaches us to put God first. When you fall back into the habit of loving flesh and blood more than God, don't worry too much. God is always at work redeeming and expanding our earth-bound loves to make them heaven-sent. Amen.
1. Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), p. 109.