Today’s Gospel reading belongs to a set of passages that for a long time I’ve had mixed feelings about. It’s among the handful of times Jesus seems to downplay (or outright reject) the role of family.
Whether it’s encouraging people to leave their parents and their homes (Matthew 19:29), telling someone to follow him instead of burying their father (Luke 9:59-60) or stating that his discipleship required whoever came to him to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters” (Luke 14:25-26), these passages often leave me wanting an explanation.
What do we make of these? Clearly, life-giving family—in all its different types and forms—is a vitally important and beautiful thing to create, foster and aspire to. It doesn’t seem to me that Jesus’s real issue is that family itself is getting in the way of living an authentic Christian life. And that’s not the suggestion of the Church either, who declares, “the family is, so to speak, the domestic church” (Lumen Gentium, §11).
So, again, what can we do with a passage such as today’s gospel?
This year, a spotlight has been placed on issues of systemic racism and structures of social inequity. Instances of racially-motivated deaths in police custody, disparities in access to resources in a pandemic and the treatment of refugees (as just a few examples) have made it all the more impossible to ignore the real impacts of privilege—systems that benefit certain groups of people while directly disadvantaging others.
Except it isn’t impossible to ignore these realities. By the very nature of this privilege, the more a person benefits from the way the world is organized, the more distant they are from those who lose out from that same organization. Jesus’s mission was to reach out to these people—those on the margins of society—and to eat with them and extend the gifts of presence, mercy and forgiveness. This required him to leave places and systems of comfort.
Maybe Jesus’s criticisms of family actually speak more pointedly to the broader themes that family often represents, such as home, security, our earliest foundations or the ‘that’s-just-the-way-we-do-it-around-here’ response. In our earlier developmental years, we are still forming our identity and finding our place in the world—and, moving away from this focus on the self takes real work.
Jesus’s words challenge me to reflect on the ways in which I let the benefits and privileges of social structures that work in my favor blind me to the suffering and needs of others. The more privileged I am, the less able (or willing) I am to see the effects of this privilege on those who are underprivileged. There comes a point in the mature Christian’s faith when they must decide to choose justice for others over their own preferred place in the system. The image of leaving one’s family, or foundation, is an appropriate metaphor for this moment of decision.
Today, I’m going to reflect, and invite you to also, on what it means to “hear the word of God and act on it” in our current global and local reality. It’s a twofold reflection: What need or opportunity is God nudging you to make a difference in? And, if you are likewise in a position of privilege, how can you actively choose (no matter how small a step) the justice and well-being of others over your own comfort, power and/or profit in real ways?
