Would Jesus vote for family values?

“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it."

- Matthew 10.37-39 (NLT).

Families are a wonderful gift from God. At their best, they can be places of loving acceptance and stable endurance, where virtues are nurtured and many needs met. They can also be ongoing nightmares, filled with bitter disappointment and all manner of brokenness. Christians need have no illusions about how difficult they can be at times. In affirming their goodness, we admit that this is often taken on trust, a step made in the hope of discovering such goodness in the slow unfolding of loving effort over time.

Some Christians want to say much more than this, and claim that defending "family values" ought to be the primary political goal of Christians. While there are many good things worth preserving bundled up in this phrase, it can also be somewhat misleading, or can receive too much emphasis. Familial relationships do not exhaust or even provide the focal point of Christian discipleship. I am a family man, married with a child and a large extended family with whom I enjoy good relationships, but holy scripture and the gospels assume that my love for my family needs to be converted, deepened and shared with a much broader family, namely the household of faith, and indeed with all, even my enemies. To focus on the family is to limit the scope of this call to what is easy. Even the pagans love their own (Matthew 5.47).

Christ even instructed his followers to "hate" their parents (Luke 14.26) and effectively disowned his own family (or at least radically redefined it) when they came to collect him lest his teaching attract too much attention (Mark 3.21-35). Whether hyperbolic or not, Christ presents a serious critique of an ethic built around familial obligations.

Therefore, I am not sure that Christian hopes and goals for political engagement are best summarised through the categories and concerns of “family”.

Karl Barth gives a good attempt at reading these passages and feeling the weight of the critique that it contains. He is not alone, but is in my reading firmly within the mainstream of Christian tradition on this.

However we end up applying the gospel passages in question, it will not do simply to set them aside as hyperbole. We may not cut off our hands (Matthew 5.30), but at the very least, we try to take Jesus’ words about the dangers of sin seriously.

If we are to follow Christ today, then family too must not be excluded from the orbit of his total claim upon our lives. Within that claim, the demands and goodness of family life are not simply endorsed without qualification, but are re-located and redirected towards a family that includes the widow and the orphan, the poor, the lonely, the single, the isolated and, ultimately, embraces the entire groaning creation.

My hunch is that taking seriously God’s commitment to relationships means relativising the place of blood family, not ignoring them or undermining their dignity (which I appreciate can happen in some quarters), but neither setting them up as the model of all human relationships and the highest social good.

Jesus and climate change XIV

But what’s he doing now?
You might be thinking: it’s all very well that God created the world and continues to sustain what is good, despite our many problems. It’s all very well that God has shown us we’re not alone but has come to dwell with us in Jesus, that back then he began a solution and promised to do more, that one day, if we believe this promise, he will finish the job he began in raising Jesus from the dead. But what about now? Climate change wasn’t an issue in Jesus’ day, and who knows whether God’s ultimate renovation will come in time to avert the potential climate catastrophes that are beginning to unfold around us. What is God doing now?

God is creating a community based on love, not fear and guilt. Actually, he’s making lots of them, all over the world. Little gatherings of people who have caught a glimpse of what God was doing in Jesus and are excited by it, people who want to be part of a renewed world, people who can’t wait for it to happen and so who start to live as though it were already true, a community that has begun to understand that death is not the last word on life, a group that refuses to let past hurts determine the present because Jesus’ death sets us free, a movement that will not give up hoping no matter how bad things get, because God can raise the dead.

What is God doing now? He’s growing a family in which everyone is a precious brother or sister and has access to the Father, a family in which fear of missing out has been replaced by trust, and mutual concern and hope. Of course, there are still family squabbles. And it’s a family with much to learn about how deeply God loves his creation. Despite its failures, this community hopes for God’s promised future while acknowledging that we’re not there yet and so doesn’t pretend to be perfect. But it’s a family where failure isn’t final either. And crucially, it’s a family that spans the globe and brings together Arabs and Jews, blacks and whites, Chinese and Americans, rich and poor, carbon-emitters and carbon-sufferers.
Eight points to the first person to guess the city near which this ruin is found.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.

Godparenting and the church family

Today is the first anniversary of my godson's baptism. According to Stanley Hauerwas, godparenting is a formalisation of what ought to be true throughout the church: that raising children is the responsibility of the entire community. The congregation is the child's extended family, and rightly helps shoulder the privilege and burden of guidance, protection, love, rebuke and provision. However, we might, with growing awareness of the prevalence of abuse, be hesitant to affirm this. Yet while protecting the vulnerable ought to be given particular attention, I don't think restricting their care to immediate family is the solution. We need to strengthen the bonds of love and trust, not withdraw from them. This common task must include unmarried people, the infertile and all those without children, both for the sake of the children and for their own sake. There are to be no members of God's family not amply supplied with mothers, brothers, sisters - and children (Mark 10.30). Of course, not every individual will have an equal role in care, and the natural parents will usually take the lion's share. But children, like the rest of us, belong to the whole family. We have ownership of neither our own lives nor those of our children. We are baptised into Christ, and so into one another.
Speaking of that baptism a year ago, I noted at the time that my (lack of) voice was suited to becoming a godfather, the cause of which I discovered the next day. I saw my speech pathologist again today and she said I am her best case of (significant) recovery from vocal chord palsy.

Family Values

Which side of US politics supports family values?

Jesus' Family Tomb?

New documentary
If you haven't already heard, a new documentary is being released called The Lost Tomb of Jesus (see trailer here* and extensive support website here) in which it is claimed that an ancient family tomb discovered outside Jerusalem in 1980 contains the ossuaries** of Jesus, his mother Mary, his brothers Joseph and Matthew, his wife Mary Magdalene and his son Judah. The documentary is produced by James Cameron (yes, the guy who did Titanic) with a significant budget and a huge splash of publicity. Of course, if true, these claims significantly undermine historic biblical Christianity. Not so much the idea that Jesus might have had a wife and child, but that he stayed dead long enough for his body to have decayed and his bones be put in a box. Paul says: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile." (1 Corinthians 15.17)
*For some reason they are using the defunct Google Video.
**An ossurary is a box used to store the bones of a corpse once it has decomposed. They were in common use in 1st century Palestine and thousands of them have been unearthed from this period. About 20% bear inscriptions of whose bones are inside.

Is this another Da Vinci Code? No, since there is no pretence of a fictional narrative in order to smuggle in dubious historical claims, with the resulting escape clause: 'it's only a novel!' The claims made are presented as straightforward attempts to tell the historical truth. Of course, I suspect that part of the reason this film has been made now is because of the huge success of DVC and the popularity of the idea that the historical Jesus (and the historical Mary Magdalene) might be very different from what has been traditionally thought.

The significance of the claims means that many people have a deep vested interest in wanting them to be true or false in order to support their pre-existing beliefs. For this reason alone, I'm sure the film will make Cameron and others a lot of money.

Speaking as one with such vested interests, the film nonetheless appears to have some significant problems. They are summarised very well in this post by well-known New Testament scholar Ben Witherington.
I resisted the temptation to title this post using a bad pun, such as "God in a box", "Empty Tomb Theory" or some reference to the Titanic sinking. Photo by HCS.