Family and other obstacles to grace
Proper 7A | Matthew 10:24-39
Last week’s gospel came after a whole bunch of healings and teachings and it said “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Jesus looked out at the people and saw that “they were harassed and helpless”.
That phrasing might seem vague in English, but the grammatical construction of the Greek directs us to see this as a development, not a perpetual state. He sees that they haven’t always been harassed and helpless, but they are now. And look like they will be in the future.
In short, he sees people who are vulnerable and exploited.
These might be like the people Jesus describes at the Temple: the widows whose homes are devoured by the Temple leaders. People whose fortunes are pulled from them to fund the wealth of the 1%, we might say today.
This is the basis for Jesus saying to the disciples “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few”. Because their work of love is needed in these fields, with these people. People who have been exploited and mistreated by the wealth creation of the already wealthy.
The Labor Isn’t Easy
Jesus makes sure they understand that the labor won’t be easy. Heck, when I go out to Ditzler’s and pick strawberries for an hour, I’m always like I don’t want to do that again. My back hurts from being all hunched over. That is what Jesus compares the labor of kin-dom building to: manual labor in the fields.
Pastor Chelsey Harmon rightly points out, “When doing God’s good seems spiritually demanding, the labourers are few…” Because laboring is hard. And many churches have profited from a gospel that is easy.
In the 2000s we called the marketing of easy faith as something that acted like a religion. It was called Moral Therapeutic Deism. People wanted a system of morality to make them feel good, built on a belief in a Divine being who didn’t particularly impact their lives. In this way, we can come to church to feel good and do right and believe the approved things and trust that this is what it means to be faithful. And yet, when we boil it down to that, it isn’t very Christian in the end. Not just because it doesn’t rely on a trinity, but because it doesn’t ask anything of us, demand anything of us but to show up when we feel like it for a reward of being told we’re good people.
Jesus compares his Way of Love to laboring in the fields. Because it isn’t about a reward or getting the merit badge to show off. It’s about doing the work of healing our neighbors and restoring the world.
It Isn’t Supposed to Be Easy
I want to reiterate that it is a distortion of the Gospel to assume it is easy and is supposed to make you feel good. But it comes from a kind of theological naivete rather than maliciousness. It’s like what happened when I’d come home with a new Nintendo or Sega Genesis game and I would open the box and start reading the instructions and my dad would just shove it in the machine and start playing it. And he would always get stuck and go, “I don’t know what to do here” and I’d be like, “If you read the instructions, you’d know…”
And I’d also be thinking “Dude, it’s my game. Let me play.”
I get this on Facebook all the time. When I try to show the complexity of scripture and tradition, some people will argue that following Jesus is supposed to be easy. They’ll start from a hermeneutic of simplicity and clarity. Like it’s a law: the gospel must be simple. Maybe they hear Jesus say in Matthew 11 “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” and they’re like, “see!” And I’m like, no, that’s a with Jesus kind of thing. Jesus makes it easier. It doesn’t mean his teachings are simple. It is to say that he makes the labor easier. But it still requires labor.
This Labor is Communal Labor
Jesus needs to talk about the hardship so they get that the labor is actual labor. And he pairs that with a promise, as he does in this week’s gospel, to presence and support from God. We don’t just have work to do for God, but with God.
This doesn’t sound like the best kind of news, but we need it delivered just like this. It is the same thing we need from a doctor when we get a serious diagnosis. We want them to tell us the truth. And help us figure out how we can work through it.
Jesus describes the work as outward and constant. And that isn’t going to be easy. There will be obstacles. People will try to stop us. People in our community and in the state house. In our own families. People who are against a project of reconciliation and love. Who devour widows’ homes, jail the homeless, and abuse the immigrant. That isn’t peace. Jesus can’t make peace with any of that.
It isn’t just our hard work, then. We have to deal with the fact that other people get in the way of that work. Especially family.
Dividing Families
In signing a proclamation announcing June is “Nuclear Family Month,” our Governor demonstrated profound ignorance of scripture and tradition, stating
“WHEREAS the nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for the family structure and has been the foundation of society since the creation of the world”
Which is nowhere so defined in scripture and is also clearly rebuffed by Scripture. Scripture offers many different examples of family structures and righteous relationships. But the state’s narrow vision is also a way of avoiding the truth of what Jesus is saying in this week’s gospel. That family isn’t more important than God. And that we must be willing to leave those who would prevent us from knowing or sharing the love of God.
Jesus will go on to put chosen family above bloodlines, as he publicly disowns his nuclear family for trying to derail the Missio Dei and prevent his death. We also see it in the very genealogy which links Jesus to David and God’s own willingness to grant Joseph fatherhood.
The dangerousness of rhetoric about Christianity and the nuclear family is not simply that it is a modern creation untethered from the whole of Christian history, but that it runs so counter to the spirit of Jesus’s ministry, and especially in light of what we read in the gospel today.
Jesus the Sword
When Jesus says he comes as a sword, he is doing so in light of treating that elevated nuclear family assumption as a given. That blood itself is the thing that ties the people together and not belief and action. And therefore, to place family above one’s neighbors.
To this, Jesus opens his arms to all of those people following him and says You are my family.
This is why we might misunderstand a line like this one, too: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” because we’re like, I love you most, Jesus! That’s the order: Jesus, family, neighbors, everyone else. But Jesus is telling us to love our neighbors as ourselves. That this is the outgrowth of loving God. And this helps expose the lie at the root of this same love ranking system because we’re not putting God #1 when we’re spitting on our neighbor. Or when we “protect” our family by putting them in “good schools” and leaving the neighbors’ kids to suffer in schools with less funding.
Jesus flips the script on family because family is at the root of our avoidance of placing God first. Because then we’d have to confront the way we put ourselves first.
And yet, in spite of our self-indulgence and fear, Jesus shows us the way forward is together. With him.
We Are All Laborers
It is easy to misconstrue Jesus here for the same reason that it is easy to avoid the truth.
But this is also why Jesus says that we matter. Each of us matters. That God knows us, by the number of hairs on our heads. Which, I want to point out, is yet another way we measure one another when God doesn’t! We all matter.
And doesn’t that make sense that we’d be called to serve one another, then? If I matter and you matter and each of us matters and then each of us is called to love the people around us, isn’t that the surest way that everyone will know the love of God? If each of us loves our neighbors, everyone here and out there will be loved.
To do this we have to accept that this mission is more important than whatever rules we give our loved ones, preconditioning the return of love on the right kind of gifts or whatever. Which also isn’t to say that we need to ditch our families or that kids shouldn’t listen to parents. This isn’t so general and exclusive as that, but to say that when those things pull us away from the Way of Love, when family expects us to step out of line from behind Jesus like Peter does or when we argue over which of us is the greatest disciple or when Mom says to Jesus Make my babies your favorite of all we’re missing the point. It’s distracting us from the fields and the work.
The fields, friends. With Jesus, this is the only family business and this the only family that matters. The family we choose. A family people want to be a part of. Because here, with these people, we all are loved. And we all get to love.