Holy Family Values

Then came the Passion, but still nothing happened. Jesus had died and risen again--even appeared to his disciples on numerous occasions shortly after the first Easter--yet the world continued just as it had the day before, without trumpets or angels or fiery battles. The first small band of followers must have felt at least some disappointment; instead of going to heaven, they were going back to their farms, to their fishing or, in cases like Peter and James's, to the work of making sense of the theological thunderbolt that had changed them forever. No matter what they were doing, their parents, their children and their earthly responsibilities were waiting.

As the years passed and the early church took shape, the original followers began, naturally, to die off, and the followers of Jesus' message had a choice to make: would they shape the message for the masses or would they opt, like Paul and the Jewish Essenes, for a more ascetic approach? The decision was urgent, for history was unfolding, the pull of the Roman Empire was strong, and without some kind of family and social structure the movement would be doomed.

It was, then, time to return to the values of the world of the Nativity, to ways of preserving families even in times of crisis. In her 1988 book "Adam, Eve and the Serpent," Elaine Pagels of Princeton University argues that Matthew recalibrated some of Jesus' more radical sayings to accommodate the familial concerns of regular people. Matthew, Pagels points out, provides a loophole for divorce: "Let no man put asunder," Jesus says, except in cases where the wife has committed adultery. Also in Matthew, Jesus reasserts the commandment "Honor your mother and father." Near the end of the first century, Pope Clement argues that Jesus' unmarried state was in no way meant to be an example for everyone: "the reason that Jesus didn't marry was that, in the first place, he was already engaged, so to speak, to the church; and, in the second place, he was no ordinary man."

No matter what one thinks of Jesus of Nazareth--that he was the Son of God, an interesting prophetic figure or a religious provocateur with particularly prolific followers--surely we can agree that he was no ordinary man. Yet at the end, in agony on Golgotha, Jesus affirmed the familial order he had spent so much of his public ministry arguing was about to be disrupted. He saw his mother standing nearby, watching her boy die a criminal's death. In a final act of human compassion, he called to his disciple John. "And he said to his mother 'Dear woman, here is your son,' and to the disciple, 'Here is your mother.' From that time on this disciple took her into his home." At the end of his life, then, Jesus took care of his mother, the penultimate act of a nice Jewish boy--and a blessing of the kinds of values that should endure, as his followers say even now, until his coming again.

With Anne Underwood, Julie Scelfo and Joshua Alston

© 2006