Abstract
The article discusses the application of radical dominical sayings outside the specific contexts that elicited them, and specifically looks at those sayings seemingly subverting the Law relating to the family when it is clear Jesus elsewhere accepted it and, moreover, confined his message to the Jews. It also notes the centrality of radical sayings about the problems of power and wealth and the marginality of those issues of sexuality and family that touch us most nearly.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. (
Matthew’s is the mild version, whereas Luke requires disciples of Jesus to ‘hate’ family members as part of the discipline of taking up ‘the cross’. But even Matthew’s version seems severely to qualify the fifth commandment to honour parents. Elsewhere in the Gospels this commandment is clearly affirmed, along with ‘the Law’ generally. That means that particular dominical injunctions always need to be set against others. Jesus uses colourful images and hyperbole to bring his point home.
Nobody takes literally the injunction to ‘pluck out’ offending eyes just because they arouse inordinate desires; and one should not extrapolate too quickly from demands for discipleship made in particular circumstances to general principles. Jesus first asked ‘the rich young ruler’ whether he had obeyed the Law before telling him to give everything he had to the poor. He then made one of his most radical observations about the ties exerted by ‘possessions’ on would-be disciples. But Jesus clearly attracted other disciples who were allowed to retain their possessions. The underlying issue concerns whatever ‘affection’, attachment or possession holds the disciple back from the commitment of ‘the kingdom’ to ‘life’ rather than to ‘raiment’. Once the disciple seeks God first, and his righteousness, all these ‘other things’ will come in abundance.
Jesus was not an abstract system maker but a master of pithy phrases intended to arouse people from slothful acceptance of taken-for-granted regulatory regimes. He affirmed the taken-for-granted rule of obedience to parents and the autonomy that comes from obedience to the will of God. Aged twelve he told his parents that he must be ‘about his Father’s business’, as well as being subject to their authority. As he grew to maturity and obeyed an urgent sense of the divine imperative within him to announce the imminent and immanent presence of the kingdom he made its priorities explicit. He understood his ‘brethren’ as a spiritual fraternity embracing those priorities rather than familial ties. Today ministers find preaching this revolutionary principle to mature women in the pews confined by obligations to parents, children or disabled partners far from easy. Revolution and sherry before lunch, or return to onerous family duties don’t sit easily together. Moreover, the academic perspectives deployed by the preacher cannot be exposed in devotional addresses without confusion of genres and people.
The problem is that Jesus initiates a revolutionary break with three closely linked ‘natural’ loyalties: blood relatives, the ‘nation’ into which one is incorporated by birth, and its territorial integrity. The gospel asks for a second birth ‘in the Spirit’ by a conscious choice sealed through baptism rather than a natural birth sealed through circumcision. That is why the issue of circumcision is so salient in the New Testament. I am saying that the priority accorded to brethren in the Spirit over blood relationships is embedded in a socio-logic opening onto a universal vision of fraternity beyond either land or nation. This generates two major problems.
The first is a specifically Christian problem because Christians are by definition those who accept the universal scope of redemption and who propagate the message ‘to all nations’ proclaimed at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Yet in Matthew 10 Jesus restricts the message to the Jews. Christians read the restrictive remit of salvation set out by Jesus with considerable discomfort. Of course, you can evade this problem by invoking a quasi-fundamentalist hermeneutic whereby Jesus followed a predetermined divine ‘plan’ equipped with foreknowledge. According to that hermeneutic the exclusive message to the Jews was simply stage one. But that notion makes nonsense of the incarnational doctrine that Jesus was ‘in all points like us’, and turns him into a programmed automaton. It undermines any redemption of human experience because Jesus did not share it. An alternative hermeneutic understands Jesus as committed throughout his ministry to the redemption of the Jews, while at the same time recognizing that those who responded, like Romans and Samaritans, lay outside ‘the covenant’. The universal implications of this recognition belong to the post-resurrection period and the coming of the Spirit on ‘all nations and tongues’.
There is a second problem embedded in the implications (as discussed by those who postulate a radical reserve towards ‘the world’ emerging in the first millennium
This is where we are now. Verse 37 in Matthew 10 arouses understandable anxiety among those attached to ordinary familial affections, because the tension between spiritual and physical love, between ‘the kingdom’ and ‘the world’, between spirit and flesh, is occluded, and anyway does not connect with ordinary life, any more than being invited in the baptismal service to enrol in ‘the pilgrim people of God’ (with its further references to ‘the flesh and the devil’) connects with young parents seeking baptism to rejoice in the gift of a child.