Holy Family Values

"Why were you searching for me? Didn't you know I had to be in my father's house?" But they did not understand what he was saying.

It would not, in all likelihood, be the last time. Their son was growing up in a time of great theological and political turbulence in Judea; in the time of Mary and Joseph, some Jews had begun to believe that the end of the world was coming any day. It would be brought about by a warrior king, a messiah from the house of David, who would destroy the wicked and usher in the kingdom of heaven on earth. The Gospels do not say what Joseph and Mary believed about the apocalypse, but John the Baptist believed in one, and when Jesus says, in Luke, "The Kingdom of God is near," an apocalypse is precisely what he means.

In the temple, Jesus is as rude as a 12-year-old can be. But he's also the kind of Jewish son a mother would be proud of: he takes the family values of his childhood and, in his later years, makes a revolutionary leap. Family, he comes to preach, is not in the blood ties and biology his parents' generation so reveres. To him, the end of the world is coming and what matters now is the community of believers, the followers of the Messiah--on earth and in heaven. What matters is the family, as he put it, of man. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus makes this point again and again. "Let the dead bury the dead," he says in Luke. There's no need for sweet goodbyes. The only thing a believer must do is "follow me" and proclaim the Kingdom of God.

The meaning of this message was powerful to his followers, who tended to be laborers and not affluent urbanites. (Though his ministry was apparently funded by relatively wealthy single women.) "For Jesus, family values means treating other people in the community as if they were your biological siblings or your mother, and that's extraordinary," says Amy-Jill Levine, author of "The Misunderstood Jew" and a professor at Vanderbilt. That is why, when the Pharisees come to him and ask him how to punish an adulterer, he takes her side. "If any of you is without sin, let you be the first to throw a stone at her," he says.

With the kingdom at hand--really at hand; Jesus says at one point that there are listeners in his hearing "who shall not taste death" before the coming of the Messiah--practical concerns about the care and feeding of kin were less than critical. Jesus de-emphasized not just earthly family, but also sex and marriage--though he preached strongly against divorce. Unmarried himself, his disciples were also either single or solo, presumably leaving behind parents, children and spouses to follow their new family. In Matthew, he speaks with respect of "eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can."

Jesus was not the first Jew to connect ideas of sexual asceticism with spiritual salvation. Around the time of his birth, another group of apocalypse-minded Jews called the Essenes lived together in ascetic community, and the Jewish historian Josephus found their marital customs odd enough to write down. One sect of Essenes, he wrote, shuns marriage and prefers instead to educate other people's children; another has "no intercourse with [their wives] during pregnancy, thus showing that their motive in marrying is not self-indulgence but the procreation of children." The break Jesus and people such as the Essenes made with the values of their youths was predicated on the end of the world.