The Divine Universe

There is a tendency among Christians to idealise or sentimentalise Jesus’ family life. There is a story in Luke’s Gospel that lets us know that Jesus, like all young boys, could be troublesome at times and that Joseph and Mary reacted as any mum and dad would.

According to Luke, this is what happened. Jesus was about twelve. The extended family and friends from Nazareth went to Jerusalem for Passover, and after the festival they all set off home again. In that kind of community of friends and relations, people didn’t worry too much about their children. They all looked out for each other. So it was not till they had gone a day’s journey that Mary and Joseph discovered that Jesus was not with the party. Imagine the panic!

The frantic parents set out to return, scanning the countryside for any sign of their boy. Nothing. Eventually they arrived back in Jerusalem, exhausted and desperate. They must have visited everyone they knew there because it was two more days before they decided to contact the police or someone official in the temple. When they got there they noticed a little knot of men who looked kind of important and, approaching, they saw Jesus in the middle, in deep conversation with them.

Mary probably broke down and wept with relief, Joseph also maybe, but they were angry too: “Jesus! Why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you for three days; we were beside ourselves with worry.” Jesus didn’t sound particularly repentant; he seems to have felt misunderstood, like so many children and adolescents. It can’t have been easy being the parents of the Messiah, especially if you didn’t know.

There’s a lot of talk today about “family values”, much of it shallow and at times hypocritical. And I’m concerned about our intense focus on the nuclear family, living in a locked and barred house in suburbia. I’m not sure it’s healthy. I know that suburban life is fraught with hazards. We hear a lot about “stranger danger”, but the home, it seems, is as dangerous as anywhere. It is inevitable in the light of sensational media reports that we should be somewhat obsessed about sexual abuse, but I am concerned about what this is doing to children, becoming aware of their own sexuality. It must be very frightening and confusing. And if there is a dramatic increase in this appalling problem (if) then we have to begin looking for the deeper, underlying causes.

There is no hint of this kind of problem anywhere in the Bible, though it was common in Roman society. One imagines that Nazareth children were safe without constant supervision. Relationships between parents and their children were probably less intense and stressful than they often are in our introverted, security-conscious nuclear families. This especially affects adolescents, longing to break free. Also, Jesus and his friends were not under such enormous pressure to achieve in school and sport as our children are.

Reading the gospels, it seems that Jesus’ family were probably the subject of scandal. It was not enough that Jesus should be born in a dirty and smelly stable; there were doubts about the boy’s paternity as well. The neighbours would probably have regarded him as a bastard.

But Luke’s story and other episodes in the gospels reassure us that the family were in no way isolated socially. Actually, Nazareth was a somewhat disreputable little town, on a main commercial highway and with a very mixed population. And that may have been better for the family than a place like Jerusalem, crawling with rich, snobbish and super-religious types, all of them terribly kosher, of course. It was in Jerusalem, according to John, that Jesus was mocked about being “born of fornication”. Prurient gossip travels fast and spreads like weeds in the garden.

Even when Jesus began to become famous, it didn’t make life for the family any easier. He seems strangely indifferent to them at times. They came looking for him on one occasion because of reports that he was acting crazy and he seemed almost to disown them. And there was that difficult bit of hyperbole where he says that, to be worthy of him we must hate our fathers and mothers. He seems to contradict the fifth commandment about honouring your parents. God’s wisdom is not always sweet and reasonable; it can be confronting.

The Torah has several precepts regarding family life, but the Law and the prophets are not basically about family values; they are about community values in the widest sense, even including foreigners. Paul picked this up and took the good news of Messianic fulfilment to the gentiles. I believe that, when we think about family values, we must ask questions about much more than what goes on in private houses. We need to ask about the values of society as a whole.

Since the industrial revolution and the creation of capitalism and suburbia, society at the grassroots level has become more fragmented. Personal interest is the driving force. At home we have to be vigilant all the time about our security. People in need sometimes have to fulfil almost impossible obligations to get support from a miserly Government, voted in by an intensely tax-sensitive electorate. Affluence has generated a narrow individualism that is relatively new, and quite tragic. The poor are often much more generous and socially cohesive. Jesus identified poverty of spirit as a prime feature of his vision of heaven - the Messianic age.

Mind you, industrialisation and capitalism have given us lots of of benefits. We enjoy the products of industry and the luxurious lifestyle they provide, and we value the opportunities for getting rich and climbing socially that capitalism offers. And all is not gloom and doom. Many voluntary organisations do a great deal to mitigate the effect of ruthless competition on the disadvantaged and the vulnerable. School or work can also be as much a focus of community as home, though they too can be the focus of pretty ferocious rivalry.

Special interest clubs, another invention of the industrial age, also provide, to some extent, what the extended family used to. Church congregations are among these. They were once formed from existing village communities; now healthy congregations create communities from among John Howard’s warring “battlers”.

So when we Christians look for an ideal of family life, don’t only think of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, think of the extended family in Nazareth. And dream! Dream of the Jewish ideal and Messianic hope of a universal family where everyone loves God and their neighbour as themselves – the Kingdom of Heaven. Dream because hopes as well as fears have a way of being self-fulfilling.