14.02.07
God and the Family (4): Jesus Remakes the Family - Matthew 15:1-20
God is passionate about families. They are His basic blueprint for the flourishing of Christian society. Take away the Christian family and you take away the foundation of civilized society and soon it descends into chaos. No wonder the devil takes as his top priority the destruction of Christian families, for in doing so, he can both destroy Christian societies and spite God in the process. But 2,000 years ago, the Lord Jesus Christ lived, died and was raised from the dead to put an end to the devil’s dominance over human societies. His coming signalled the end of the time of Satan and ushered in the Kingdom of Light. His coming made it possible for us to live as God designed us to – as functioning and loving members of families.
If I may briefly take 30 seconds to restate what we have already gleaned from the Scriptures regarding the relationship between God and the Family. In our first study, from Genesis 1 and 2, we saw that God created the Family – setting forth the husband and wife partnership as the cornerstone of healthy family life. In the second study, from Genesis 3, we saw that sin broke the family bringing distance between that husband wife relationship and with it, suspicion and family breakdown. In our third study, from 1 Chronicles 3, we saw that God works in families, and no matter how far gone and degenerate our families have become, God can still work. Today I want to bring our studies in the relationship between God and the family into the New Testament by stating that Jesus re-makes the family that sin has broken. There is no single text that incorporates all I want to say today so we are going to be looking at a range of texts throughout the Gospels. I want to see two things about how Jesus goes about re-making the family:
[A] The Primacy of Jesus in the Family
In Matthew 10:37-37-38 Jesus lays down the guidelines for having a successful family life – it is to have Him at the centre of your family. A family without Jesus at the centre is unstable, a family with Jesus at the centre is the way it was designed to be. He says, “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of men.” Jesus here is talking of the cost of discipleship – a disciple of Jesus must love Jesus more than anything else in the whole world, including his father, including his children, including his wife and as Jesus talks about the cross, including his own life. Now you say to me, how is it possible to love Jesus more than any of these? Well, it’s because to know Jesus is to know the most wonderful, the most beautiful, the most perfect person imaginable. The more we get to know our family members, the more we love them, but the more faults we see in them. The more we get to know Jesus, the more we realise just how perfect He is and we love Him for that.
But then you ask, why must Jesus be primary in my family? Why must I have Him at the centre of the life of my family? Why should I love Him more than I love my wife or my children? Because to have Him at the centre of your family means that your relationship to your wife doesn’t primarily depend on how you feel about her, but on the promises you have made to Christ regarding her. In other words, supposing your love for her goes cold, because you love Christ you won’t leave her or go off with another woman, you’ll stay faithful to her and fight for love again –and almost inevitably, it will come. For her to know that gives her security and comfort in your love. You may feel as if your children aren’t achieving the grades at school you want them to, or instead of becoming lawyers, they become dustmen, but having Christ at the centre of your family will mean that you cannot disown them – and for them to know that gives them great security and comfort in your love. You will love them unconditionally, because that’s what the word of Christ tells us to do and that’s what His love within us compels us to do.
Do you remember that interview with Princess Diana, where fighting back the tears she said about Prince Charles and Lady Camilla, “I always felt as if there were 3 people in my marriage”. Well, in a Christian sense, unless there are 3 people in the marriage, you, your wife and Christ, then what you have is a partnership, but not a true Christian marriage. But having this third person in your marriage won’t make your wife feel neglected and spurned, it will make her feel secure and strong in your love for her.
Having Christ at the centre of your family life secures and seals your commitment to your wife and your children. It doubles the heights of your joy, and halves the depths of your sorrow. It brings God’s blessing into your family and creates an atmosphere of godly discipleship and devotion to Jesus Christ. It stabilises the basic unit of human society by returning the family to God’s original perfect design for it. Have you got Christ at the centre of your family, or are there other things there that shouldn’t be there?
[B] The Passion of Jesus for the Family
Although there is no one single passage where Jesus teaches all that we need to know regarding the family unit, if we scan the Gospels we come to realise that family life was at the very heart of the teaching and example of the Lord Jesus Christ. He had and has a passion for family life. It is through the family that the primacy of Jesus over the whole creation is demonstrated. I want to briefly look at what Jesus says about each relationship in the family:
1. Marriage – in Matthew 19:1-12 the Pharisees come to Jesus asking Him about the conditions under which divorce is permissible. During the thousand years since Moses had delivered the Ten Commandments, the Jewish Rabbis had created a whole new set of laws regarding the circumstances under which it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife. They had made it very easy to divorce. The man could divorce his wife for any reason at all. The woman, of course, had no rights. This was a hot topic in the Judea of Jesus’ day, since the ‘King’ of Judea, Herod, had married his brother’s wife and used some of the Rabbi’s teachings to justify what he had done. But Jesus doesn’t want to talk about divorce – He wants to talk about marriage, because for Him, marriage was the lifestyle for which men and women had been made. Marriage was not a restriction of liberty, but the proper sphere in which men and women could express who they really are. So, in effect, Jesus makes it harder for people to divorce than the custom of the day permitted – Jesus places such a premium upon marriage that only under the extremest of circumstances is divorce permitted, and only then as an acknowledgement of the reality of sinful behaviour and not an excuse for it. If the marriage bond is devalued, if God’s purpose in the creation of male and female is ignored, chaos results. We must do everything we can to save marriages, not make it easy for couples to divorce. A recent study by sociologists from the University of Chicago found no evidence that if you are unhappily married it is better to divorce than to stay in the marriage. I quote, “even more dramatically, the researchers also found that two-thirds of unhappily married spouses who stayed married reported that their marriages were happy five years later.” Work at marriage – it is the basic fundamental of human society and of the family, and if you don’t believe me, listen to Jesus.
2. Brotherhood – Jesus wasn’t married, but Jesus did have brothers. We know that He had at least 3. What then was Jesus’ teaching and example on how to be a good brother? There are two aspects to this:
· Companionship – Jesus’ family followed Him most places. For example, in John 2:12 we find Jesus with His disciples, His mother and His brothers, travelling down to Capernaum. Jesus spent time with His brothers – even in the three years of His public ministry, where, as we read the Gospels we realise how busy He was, He still made time for His earthly brothers. They were His companions, often whilst travelling. We must also, even when they don’t believe in Christ, make time for our brothers and sisters. It is clear that Jesus loved them very much and enjoyed their company.
· Concern – Jesus was interested and deeply concerned for the spiritual well-being of His family. We have already noticed, in our first point about the primacy of Jesus in the family, how it is faith, not blood, which is the most important element of family life. Yet, Jesus made a special effort to ensure the spiritual well-being of His brothers. We read in John 7:5 that His brothers did not believe in Him – they were like the brothers of Joseph in the Old Testament – perhaps joining in with the crowds in mocking Him, or at best being indifferent to what He did and said. They weren’t present at the crucifixion, perhaps they were afraid for their own safety, perhaps they were still far away in Galilee. But we do know, from 1 Corinthians 15:7, that after His resurrection, Jesus appeared one on one to His brother James. This must have been an earth-shattering event for James and it is fairly certain that it led to him having faith in Jesus because we read in Acts 1:14 that when the disciples met in the upper room after the ascension of Jesus to heaven, Mary was present as were the brothers of Jesus. James himself went on to become the leader of the Church in Jerusalem – one of the pillars of the Church and the author of one of the books of the Bible.
Jesus spent time with His brothers, but His ultimate concern was for their spiritual well-being, that they would come to know Him. And so He even appeared in His resurrection body to one of them. That is how much ‘brothers’ and ‘family’ meant to Jesus. Does it mean that to us? Do we love our brothers and sisters enough to bring them the good news of Jesus so that they too will come to trust in Him?
3. Parents – one thing which we seem to be losing in our society is a due respect and care for our parents, especially our elderly parents. Jesus was far from that – in John 19:25-27, in some of His last few words as He hung and suffered on the cross, He looked down and saw His mother and standing beside her, the apostle John, and He said to His mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to John, “Here is your mother.” And we read that from that time on, John took her into his home and cared for her. Some of the very last words of Jesus were reserved not for Himself and the pain He was suffering, but for His mother and her future care now that He was leaving. He didn’t think of Himself, but of her – His mother. And then, in Matthew 15 He condemns the Pharisees for their lack of concern for their parents. Driving home the importance of honouring your father and mother, He criticises them for devoting money to the Lord that should have been devoted to the care of parents. What the Pharisees had done was to drive a wedge in between the commandment to honour your father and mother and their devotion to God, not realising that in fact one shows one’s devotion to God by the honouring of your father and your mother. Jesus rounds on them, “You hypocrites!” Just because you no longer ‘need’ your parents in the conventional sense doesn’t mean that you should ignore them and forget to care for them. What like are we with our parents? Do we honour them when we are in our teens, twenties, thirties and as long as we have them with us? To do that, according to Jesus, is true godliness and devotion – the man or woman who has Christ first in their lives will honour his or her parents.
4. Children – in the society of Jesus’ day, children were objects, they were second class citizens – in fact it was only men who mattered at all. Imagine then what a stir Jesus caused when, in Matthew 19:13-15, the Jesus who was the busiest man in Judea at the time and could have spent all His time dealing with the problems of adults, placed His hands on children and prayed for them. He had time for them; He saw them as being integral members of the family – to be loved and cherished, not to be ignored and thought of as an inconvenience. Indeed, in those verses He holds up the faith of a child as being a model for how adults should believe in Him also – with simplicity and total dependence. The least powerful in society, the children, are important to Him. And so should they be to us – we, as parents, should be blessing them with our love, our example and our teaching; we must be praying for them to believe in Christ and live as Christian believers – so that their testimony may be, “I was raised in a Christian home, by Christian parents who showed me the love of Christ, taught me the love of Christ, and prayed for me to know the love of Christ. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a Christian.”
Jesus was and is passionate about the family, and we too, if we are His, must pray that His passion for the family would become our passion for our families. But you cannot be truly passionate about families, about your wife, brothers, parents and children, unless you have Jesus Christ at the centre of your family life. If you love your children more than you love Christ, then you love them less than you should; because what they need is a daddy and mummy who love Jesus more than them. If you love your wife more than you love Christ, then you love them less than you should, because what she needs is a husband who loves Christ more than her. But to do this, you yourself need to love Christ – do you love Christ? Bow the knee before Him now and proclaim Him Lord of your life and the life of your family. I close by reciting part of the the poem of John Piper, “Love her more and Love her Less”
A doctrine in a paradox:
If you now aim your wife to bless, Then love her more and love her less.
It is not wise or kind to call, An idol by sweet names, and fall,
Above your best beloved on earth, The God alone who gives her worth.
And she will know in second place, That your great love is also grace,
The greatest gift you give your wife, Is loving God above her life.
And thus I bid you now to bless: Go love her more by loving less. AMEN