Download discussion questions: Jesus’ Family Values
Getting to Philippians, the long way around.
The first comment in our group after looking at the handout with three passages from the gospels was, “I thought we were going to study Philippians.” I explained that we are on our way to Philippians, but we are taking the scenic route. Starting from Obadiah (last week) there are a few stops in between. Those brief detours will make all the difference in understanding what the Apostle Paul meant as we read his letter to the church in Philippi.
Obadiah’s prophetic word from God was against Edom, the people descended from Esau. Their sin was their treatment of the people of Israel, descendants of Esau’s brother Jacob. They were arrogant and self-confident in their security, but that was not their worst sin. “Beyond the pride…what is the sin of Edom? It is a manifest display of lack of brotherliness.”[1] The people of God as a family is important to the Father. The complete destruction and disappearance of the Edomite people as predicted in Obadiah’s prophecy is evidence of that importance.
Before moving into Paul’s letter to the Philippians, we will look at some other perspectives on family and culture. Those perspectives will set the stage for a better understanding of the issues Paul was addressing in the church in the city of Philippi.
Jesus’ Family Values
Three brief passages (see the handout) give us glimpses into the radical ideas about family that Jesus taught. After spending several minutes looking at the passages, our discussion began with suggested headings or titles for each section, such as:
- Matthew 8:18-22 “An Ungrateful Son” or “Shredding Family Honor”
- Mathew 10:34-39 “Upside Down Thinking”
- Mark 3:31-35 “Jesus is Crazy”
That third title actually has support in the text of Scripture. As crowds continued to gather around Jesus, “when His family heard it, they went out to seize Him, for they were saying, ‘He is out of His mind.’” (Mark 3:21).
A Radical Expectation – Matthew 8:18-22
Another question early in our discussion was about the tone or atmosphere of each of the passages. Suggested descriptions from our group included (in addition to “crazy” mentioned above):
- Rude
- Insensitive
- Foolish
- Dishonoring
- Disloyal
Those are hardly the adjectives we usually associate with Jesus. The context of the first-century culture makes the words of Jesus even more shocking. As one member of our group pointed out, our cultural expectations, (twenty-first century, western values) focus on individuality and independence. Parents raise children to “leave the nest” and become well-adjusted, independent members of society. In contrast, in the culture Jesus spoke into, the family was the primary “safety net” financially, emotionally, and socially. Instead of independence, sons followed their father’s trade (Jesus the carpenter, James and John, fishermen with their father). When sons married, they typically lived with their blood family, or at least in a house on the same land. Caring for one’s family was a non-negotiable responsibility.
Indeed, the great majority of people in collectivist peasant societies (such as Jesus’ first-century Galilee) never leave home. They live in close proximity to parents, siblings, and offspring, working and worshiping with their extended families until death. Such an approach to residence proves emotionally beneficial, for spending one’s life with extended family in a single geographical location provides people in traditional cultural settings with a great degree of relational and economic security. How different things are in America![2]
So the response of Jesus to the man wanting to bury his father may sound rude or insensitive to us. It must have been incomprehensible to all those who heard it. Consider a modern day equivalent:
“Forget planning the funeral. Let’s just take off together on a short-term missionary trip. Let the other relatives take care of the arrangements. Let the dead bury their own dead.” I would say nothing of the sort to a grieving son in the situation described above. Neither would you. But Jesus did. …
In Jewish culture providing a proper burial for one’s father was a most sacred and inviolable family responsibility. This gets to the heart of the issue, for there is much more going on here than insensitivity. Jesus’ words are not merely insensitive. They are diametrically opposed to first-century Jewish family values; for that matter they fly in the face of any society’s family values. [3]
A Radical Explanation – Matthew 10:34-39
Not long after that shocking episode (in Matthew 8), Jesus said more about His agenda. That explanation made clear that the “let the dead bury the dead” comment was not an isolated slip of the divine tongue, but was rather just the beginning of the effect Jesus expected to have. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). He went on to the specifics of what that would mean and the possibility of disrupted family relationships.
Our modern western families are generally so unlike the families of the original hearers. We can easily read over those words and either spiritualize them (“Jesus didn’t really mean what He said.”) or we simply don’t see the weight of the words. A person in our group told how when he became a Christian as a young adult, his brother stopped speaking to him. In our culture, that was “no big deal” and reading the Matthew 10 passage had little impact. In Jesus day, such separation from one’s family could be considered what a member of our discussion called “relational suicide.”
Those words would have had a devastating impact on the crowds around Jesus. The family was the primary social institution and the safety net. Imagine the persons in the crowd asking themselves, “I have to give up all that to follow this rabbi?”
Someone asked about the words Jesus repeated three times in the brief Matthew 10 passage (great observation!): “not worthy of Me” (v. 37, twice, v. 38). Was Jesus setting up some kind of works-based standard? Do we have to live up to some criterion in order for Him to accept us? The consensus of our group was that Jesus was looking for people who take Him seriously, who are ultimately loyal to Him, regardless of the cost. Someone pointed out similar wording in Acts 5:41. When the apostles were arrested, beaten, and released, they went out “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.” Steadfastness in suffering, whether beatings from authorities or rejection by a family apparently was a mark of the loyalty that marks a true follower of Jesus.
A Radical Example – Mark 3:31-35
Jesus did not only talk about His seismic shift in family loyalty. He modeled it. His concerned family sent word to Him through the crowd. An acceptable, honorable, respectable son would have immediately stopped whatever he was doing and go out to answer to the distraught mother and anxious siblings. Instead, Jesus effectively ignored them, even suggesting that they were less important to Him than the crowd of strangers around Him.
He modeled such behavior in His own family relations. … Jesus, as the oldest surviving male in His family (we may presume that His father Joseph had died), was responsible to defend the honor of, and provide leadership for, His patrilineal kinship group. … In a single stroke Jesus dishonored Himself and His family by refusing to exercise that crucial family role. And He did so in a public setting.[4]
What could be more shocking? What could be more confusing to the crowd? On the one hand, they would have been scandalized by His treatment of blood relatives. On the other hand, they had been amazingly affirmed by Jesus as he looked around at the crowd, calling them His family. He included them in “the most intimate and highly charged relationship for people in the world of Jesus and the early Christians—the bond among brothers and sisters.”[5] Here we begin to see the shape of the vision Jesus had for His followers. With this perspective in mind, the frequent New Testament use of family imagery, specifically “brothers” and “sisters” takes on a whole new depth.
Whoever Does the Will of God
Mark 3:35 demonstrates that Jesus was not simply saying that our loyalty to Him must exceed our loyalty to our earthly families. Jesus was using the preeminence and centrality of the family to define the people He was calling to Himself. Those who do the will of God, who follow God’s Son, become His family, not simply as individuals but as brothers and sisters. Those brothers and sisters are bonded to each other with loyalty and zeal for each other and for the honor of the family.
If the prophetic word of Obadiah gave us a glimpse of how important God takes His family, the “family values” expressed and modeled by Jesus begin to show us what that should look like in our relationships as believers. His “family values” were focused on a new family, a family defined by “doing the will of God” through following Him.
Jesus used the non-negotiable commitment to family as the pattern for the community He was forming among His followers. We begin to see that Jesus was intentionally creating “a radically different relational environment.”[6] The depth and intensity of that relational environment was to exceed even their natural family ties. We will continue to see His intention carried out as we look at additional passages in the gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles. When we arrive at Philippians, we will be more prepared to see how Paul continued in that same direction. How could that happen in a church surrounded by a Roman culture that was even more individualistic and self-obsessed than our own?
[1] Jack P. Lewis, The Minor Prophets (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1966), 94.
[2] Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2009), 27.
[3] Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2009), 53.
[4] Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2009), 55.
[5] Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2009), 39.
[6] Joseph H. Hellerman, Embracing Shared Ministry: Power and Status in the Early Church and Why It Matters Today (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2013), 11.