Introduction

When we think of a hearth, we might think of a rustic fireplace, but in Jewish homes around the time of Jesus, they were often just a depression in the dirt floor where you would burn a fire of wood or animal dung for cooking and to heat the home. Despite this lack of glamour, In much of the ancient world, the hearth was seen as synonymous with the household. Being gathered around it was a symbol of belonging. The people gathered around that fire were people to whom you had the highest obligations. To be cast out of that gathering made a person vulnerable and alone.

Jesus came into this context and he creates a new hearth with a new fire. While the traditional hearth was exclusive (our family only!), the new hearth was inclusive, it welcomed people from every tongue, tribe and nation. At this hearth, belonging wasn’t about descent or marriage, but rather from a relationship to the true head of the household—God the Father—who adopts us as his children by faith.

But while Jesus redefines what family ought to look like for his followers, practical realities mean that we still have family obligations to which we must attend. So today, I want to look at what the Bible—the New Testament, in particular—says about families. I want to ask what it looks like to live in a family while taking Jesus’ commands seriously.

I. A Redefinition of Family

A. Jewish Family Obligations

In the ancient world, people had a much stronger sense of obligation to their families. Part of this was just a practical necessity. With no pensions or social safety net, people depended on their children to care for them in their old age. I imagine if we did away with our pensions social safety net, it would likely have an immediate effect on how families organized themselves.

But on top of that, individualism—the idea that my identity is primarily defined as ‘I’ not ‘we’—was completely foreign in the ancient world. We grow up thinking of ourselves as individuals first, and parts of a collective second. This is an historical quirk. Even today, Asian, African and Latin American cultures are more group-oriented and less individualist than we are.

In group-oriented cultures, people’s core identity is determined by the group to whom they belong. This tends to create tight-knit, but often exclusive communities. This plays out in Israelite history. People’s allegiance to the nation was less than their allegiance to their tribe. This made it hard to hold Israel together as a unified nation. We see inter-tribal tensions playing out in the book of judges Also, the tribe-over-nation dynamic led to the fracturing of Israel in two following the death of King Solomon. So in the collectivist world inhabited by the Biblical authors, you owed your highest allegiance to your household, then less allegiance to people as they were more distantly related to you. You didn’t owe any allegiance to foreigners.

B. Did Jesus Blow Up the Family?

But Jesus kind of blows this up. There’s a story in the gospels that we likely read without much thought, but when we understand the context I’ve just laid out, it takes on a whole new meaning. It takes place just after Jesus’ ministry gets going. He’s healing and teaching, and things have gotten so hectic he barely has time to eat. His family is gravely concerned. They actually think Jesus has lost his mind, so they come to take him away, to stop the work he’s doing. As they come, some of Jesus’ opponents start making accusations that he’s in league with the devil, surely inflaming his family’s concern. Then we get the crux of the story. 

Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him. They stood outside and sent word for him to come out and talk with them. There was a crowd sitting around Jesus, and someone said, “Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.” 

Jesus replied, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” Then he looked at those around him and said, “Look, these are my mother and brothers. 35 Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother”(Mark 3:31–35, NLT).

When Jesus’ family shows up and asks to speak with Jesus, the assumption is that he should jump to it. But instead of going out to them, Jesus gives us this shocking redefinition of what family is: Those who do the will of God are his family.

Jesus is saying that when we join this new, Kingdom-of-God movement, our obligations must be reordered. Jesus’ refusal to defer to his family means that when they try to assert authority over him, to stop him from doing what God has called him to do, Jesus refuses. His highest allegiance is to God and the community of people who are doing God’s will. If his family is going to try to stop him from doing what God commands, then he regretfully has to decline. While people in our culture tend to read this story as a non-event, to people in group-oriented cultures, this story is dynamite. Jesus calls some of their most foundation values into question.

Is Jesus saying that family doesn’t matter in God’s kingdom? His later actions suggest otherwise. We can see that while Jesus prioritizes his kingdom work, he doesn’t forsake his family obligations. First, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for allowing a person to give the financial support they would give their aged parents to God instead. He says this is a violation of God’s command to honour your father and mother, hardly something Jesus would say if he doesn’t value the family. Also, in John’s gospel, when Jesus is on the cross, he asks John to look after his Mother, so Jesus is still taking on the obligation to honour his mother by making sure she’s provided for.

So what ought we to make of Jesus’ redefinition of family? Jesus thinks family is important. But he thinks the kingdom of God is more important. He also wants us to expand our definition of family, to go beyond those related to us by blood or marriage, to a wider, more diverse circle. To use our opening metaphor, he says that God has a new hearth, and that around that hearth, there is plenty of room for people of all kinds to gather.

C. Practical Implications

What practical difference does this make? In Jesus’ culture, having a child follow Jesus was scandalous to many Jewish parents. You can imagine, then, that many parents tried to dissuade their children from following Jesus. They might threaten to disinherit them, or shun them, because following this man who was crucified for heresy (their perspective) would bring dishonour on the whole family. So many of Jesus’ earliest followers would have faced a stark choice: Choose Jesus, or choose your family. This is what Jesus is talking about when he says,

“Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! I came not to bring peace, but a sword. [remember: swords divide] 

 ‘I have come to set a man against his father, 

a daughter against her mother, 

and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 

Your enemies will be right in your own household!’ 

“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine(Matthew 10:34–37, NLT).

Jesus is saying that God’s kingdom must come first. Recognizing that this will inevitably lead to many people being kicked out of their families, He commands us to broaden our circle of family to look after those whose obedience has exacted such a high price. This same reality is on display when Jesus reassures his disciples, who have left their families to follow him, of the reward for doing so.

Everyone who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or property, for my sake and for the Good News, will receive now in return a hundred times as many houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and property—along with persecution. And in the world to come that person will have eternal life (Mark 10:29–30, NLT)

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He’s saying if we lose our family, we become part of a much bigger, richer family. God doesn’t intend for us to go it alone, but for us to find strength together as a new family, We are meant to support one another as if we’re brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

The kind of familial excommunication Jesus has in mind can happen today, but it’s not as common as it used to be. But for us the most practical implication of Jesus’ new definition of family is that we need to make space in our families for those who don’t have family. When I was in my mid-twenties, I had moved a long way from home. On ‘family’ holidays like Thanksgiving and Easter, I often didn’t have a chance to visit family. And those were precisely the time when people at church siloed themselves off into family groups. The focus on family came with a dark side: it excluded those, like me, who didn’t have family around.

Or Consider Christmas. Christmas is a time when we celebrate that God came to us, that he joined the human family. And yet, in our culture, and often in the church, we celebrate it as an exclusive time for family. How can we exclude the outsider while celebrating God coming as an outsider to us? It makes no sense.

I would suggest that, if you have the opportunity, a more faithful way to celebrate Christmas is to open our homes to fellow Christians who don’t have family, to show that we take seriously the idea that because of Jesus we are all one family. There are likely Christians in our orbit who don’t have any family (at least any locally). We have an opportunity to communicate in very practical ways that we see them as brothers and sisters.

Of course, its’ not just the holidays. Think of all the ways that families often help one another. You send the kids off to Mom & Dad’s place when you have an emergency that needs to be dealt with, you ask your brother to help you build a new deck. You talk to your sister to get advice when you don’t know what to do. Are we willing to do these things for one another, especially for those who don’t have family around?

Obviously this sort of thing can be abused. Obligations in families run in both directions. We can’t expect to oblige everyone else to help us in our time of need and then become conveniently unavailable in the time of their need. To be one family means that we should be willing to generously give to and humbly receive from each other.

In an age where we value privacy highly, where we insist on keeping our business to ourselves, this is deeply challenging. But I think if we can get over the discomfort that sharing our lives entails, there is tremendous potential for blessing.

So to summarize what we’ve seen so far: Jesus calls us to place our allegiance to God and his kingdom above our family allegiance, and to make space in our families for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Now, I’d like to turn to what Paul says.

II. The Family as a Place of Discipleship

Paul’s letters were filled with practical advice for Christians trying to figure out what faithfulness to Jesus looked like in their day-to-day lives. Paul understood that Jesus was saying that we need to make space in our life together for Christians who aren’t our biological family. This is why, for example, in Galatians 2, he recounts a confrontation with Peter after Peter refuses to eat with Gentiles believers. To exclude Gentiles from the table was to clearly communicate that they were not members of the family. Jesus’ command was a call to a radical hospitality, and Peter was falling short of it.  So Paul understands the need to broaden our understanding of family. But at the same time, Paul also understands that families are one of the places where we practically live out the love of Jesus.

A. Not aspiring to a Lower Bar

Paul is adamant that becoming a part of the church can’t lower our responsibilities to our own earthly family members. We see this in Paul’s discussion about ministry to widows. Very early in the church’s life together, caring for widows became a focus of the church’s work for social justice. The appointment of the seven deacons in Acts 6 was about fixing problems that had developed in the church’s program to support widows. Over time, though, the church had to adapt its programs of support to the varied realities of the widows’ situations. Some windows had no support, and would be destitute if not cared for. Those widows needed to be the priority. Others had Christian children or grandchildren with the means to support them. That kind of support would be an expectation in their broader culture. Paul calls on those kids and grandkids to honour those cultural commitments. Instructing Timothy how to handle the question of widows and their families, he says:

Take care of any widow who has no one else to care for her. But if she has children or grandchildren, their first responsibility is to show godliness at home and repay their parents by taking care of them. This is something that pleases God (1 Timothy 5:3–4, NLT).

You could imagine that someone, hearing Jesus’ pronouncement that the church was our new family, might argue that since the church is mom’s family, then the whole church should be on the hook to look after her, even if I have enough to support her myself. In effect, this would use the grace of Jesus as an excuse to lower the bar for their moral behaviour.

Christians cannot display God’s extravagant love and his holiness by holding ourselves to a lower standard of conduct than what is expected of those outside the church. God’s grace helps us live holy lives, it does not serve as an excuse to live lives of greater selfishness. God had, after all, commanded the Israelites to honour their father and mother. Jesus comes to show us what true faithfulness to the law looks like, not to set us free from our obligations to one another. So we are all family, but we still have obligations to honour our responsibilities to our earthly families, except where those obligations conflict with God’s commands.

B. Learning Mutual Submission

It’s not enough to simply do what the culture expects for our families (and it certainly won’t do to do less). The logic of God’s kingdom also challenges the way we interact. In the Greco-Roman culture the assumption was that weak people had great responsibility to those who were their ‘betters’ (they had a very hierarchical understanding of the world that seems very off-putting to modern western readers).

We can see this in what scholars call “household codes.” Household codes were philosophies concerning the proper ordering of authority within households and society in general. And example of this is found in Aristotle’s Politics, where he says: “Of household management … there are three parts–one is the rule of a master over slaves, … another of a father, and the third of a husband.” 

Aristotle legitimates the power of the powerful. Nowhere does he make any reference to the obligations of husbands to their wives, of parents to their children or of masters to their slaves. Compare this to what Paul writes in Ephesians.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her…Children, obey your parents because you belong to the Lord, for this is the right thing to do. … Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord. Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. … Masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Don’t threaten them; remember, you both have the same Master in heaven, and he has no favorites (Ephesians 5:21–6:9 [edited for brevity],  NLT).

Understandably, modern readers often get hung up on the part about slavery and about wives submitting to their husbands, The latter is often used by husbands to claim that the Bible really does put them in charge. “The Bible says ‘submit,’ so you have to do as I say!” This misses the point completely.

While Paul doesn’t relieve those with less authority from their responsibilities to those with more authority, he does give those with greater authority, greater responsibility. So for example, The wives here are asked to submit to their husbands, but the husbands are supposed to give themselves up for their wives as Jesus gave himself up for the church.

The point Paul is making is not that we need to replicate the gender roles of first century Greek culture. And he’s certainly not insisting we reestablish slavery. He challenged those in that culture to reimagine authority in light of Jesus’ self-giving, cross-shaped love. I think he’s asking us to reimagine our culture’s expectations of family in light of that same love. In whatever form family takes in our cultural context, he’s saying that authority must not be used to dominate, but instead to sacrificially love.

C. The Family As a Classroom of Love

Paul understands that our families are the prime place where we learn to practice this cross-shaped love. As a child, you have to learn to defer to the wisdom of your parents, even when, around the age of 16, you come to the conclusion that you know everything you need to know and your parents know absolutely nothing (Can’t wait for that!).

When you marry, you suddenly have to learn to share your life with another person. Suddenly you are responsible to them for how you spend your time and money. You learn quickly that you need to attend to your spouse’s emotional needs or the relationship can quickly become unworkable.

When you have your children, suddenly you have little people who will literally die if you don’t put aside what you want to look after their needs.

Family forces us learn that we belong to something bigger than ourselves. At it’s most basic level, family is the place where we learn what sacrificial love is all about. But it’s not meant to stop at the walls of our homes.

Having parents, or a spouse and kids, and trying to love them in a Godly way, is one of the places we learn love. If you’re not a part of a family, there are, of course, other places you an also learn these lessons. Church, for example. We are meant to take the lessons we’ve learned in the classroom of the family and put them into practice in the bigger family of faith.

Submitting to your parents taught you how to submit to others who love you even when you don’t agree. You might apply this lesson by learning to submit to the wisdom of those who are more mature in the faith than you are. (By this I mean people whose lives demonstrate Godly fruit, not necessarily those who have been Christians the longest, or those who hold formal positions of authority).

Loving your husband or wife teaches us how to consider how the life we build together in mutual submission is richer than one based on radical self-reliance. We can practice this by building deep and rewarding friendships with each other, understanding that even when they involve effort, the effort is worth it.

Parenting children teaches us the importance of being dependable even when it is costly. We can put that lesson into practice through steadfast commitment to our brothers and sisters in need.

The family is an important place where discipleship can happen. But the love it teaches us is meant to overflow its boundaries.

Conclusion

So I hope you can see that the New Testament doesn’t completely blow up family, but neither does it call on us to preserve the form of family exactly as it is in our culture. In the New Testament, Jesus teaches us that our commitment to God and his family must come first, and that we need to make space in our collective identity for outsiders.

And Paul teaches us to reinterpret our culture’s understanding of family through the lens of cross-shaped love. When we do this, it prepares us to grow our family to include the outsider as Jesus commands. 

It teaches us to gather around the new hearth with God’s ever-expanding family. That hearth doesn’t just give us warmth and belonging, it serves as a beacon in a hurting and lonely world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden, and a lamp isn’t put under a basket, but is placed on a stand for all to see. These are images of fire and light welcoming people in. Jesus doesn’t redefine family solely to address the practical needs of his followers who find themselves without family.

It’s more than that. It is a beacon of hope. It illuminates a community whose life together shows a different way—a counterintuitive way—that demonstrates the wisdom of God. As we take our familial obligations to one another seriously, we are also being a light to those on the outside looking in, and a sign of God’s love for the world.

So this week, I would invite you to examine yourself, and ask: are you placing Jesus first, or if you’re bowing the the expectations of people who might dissuade you from being faithful? Are you making space for believers around you who are lonely and excluded to feel like they really are a part of the family? And are you allowing the challenges of living as a family to teach you lessons about cross-shaped love? Those lessons will be vital to learn if you want to follow Jesus faithfully. Remember, though we were strangers, God has invited us into his family. As he has done for us, let’s learn to do for one another.