Seven Last Words: A “New” Focus on the Family

A sermon based upon John 19: 16b-27

The Third Last Word from the Cross

Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.

The Third Sunday in Lent, March 7^th, 2010

Not a few Christians were stirred up a couple of years ago when the book “The DaVinci Code” came out.    The major controversy was its suggestion that the Catholic Church has been covering up the truth that Jesus was a married man and had a family and that the royal families of Europe are descents of Jesus.     

Several years ago, another controversial book (1960) and eventually a movie (1988) was made called the “The Last Temptation of Christ.”  The book stirred quite a controversy and was put on several “banned book” lists, because, though it maintained Jesus was free for sin, the author Nikos Kazantzakis, depicted Jesus being subject to every temptation we humans are, including fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, sexual desire and, perhaps greatest and last temptation, to avoid the cross, settle down and raise a family like the rest of us.   Kazantzakis argues in the book that  Jesus struggled to do God’s will,  but never gave in to any normal temptation of the flesh.

So, what’s the big deal?    What if Jesus had avoided or survived the cross and then settled down to raise a family like most of us do in life?  Since it is the priority of most of lives to grow up and raise a family, what would be wrong to have “Jesus” as a model husband or an earthy “dad”?   Is this really so bad?  Sometimes, even those of us believe in the Jesus of the Bible miss the Jesus of the Bible by making him out to be just another pro-family advocate.

JESUS WAS NOT A “TYPICAL” FAMILY MAN

For example, look at today’s third word from the cross where Jesus speaks directly to his mother and to John, the disciple who he loved.   While he is dying, a sight that must have been unbearable for any mother, Jesus’ first word to her is not a comforting, personal, last word to his dear mother, his, but a charge to a new future:“Woman, here is your Son…..” 

On one hand, reminding you mother you aren’t her son anymore is in no way to be respectful to your mother when you are dying, is it?   But if, you listen more deeply, to what John is telling us about Jesus, you will see that when it comes to “family” Jesus has a completely different agenda than we have.  Jesus was in no way anti-family, and most of what Jesus teaches us can be used to strengthen our own families, but to make Jesus a good, normal family man is nowhere close to what gospels tell us about Jesus.  

Jesus has done this before.  He does not always give us “family friendly” words in this strange gospel of ours.   When Mary came to Jesus telling him that the wedding has run out of wine, Jesus turns to her and speaks what seems to be very scolding words to her, “Woman, my time has not yet come!”  On another occasion, when Jesus was teaching God’s truth to the people, his family came to take him home, perhaps for his own protection.   Jesus responded to his family even more harshly in words that said, “You aren’t my family any more.  My family is only those who do the will of God.”  It sounds very cruel and even a little childish, don’t you think?   And who can forget Jesus’ response, when as a 12 year old, he remained behind in the big city and his terrorized his parents with the dire thought that he was lost.   When his mother rightly reprimanded him for what he had just put them through, Jesus answered, “Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business.”  Again, is this any way to talk back to your frightened mother?  If our children follow Jesus, it is dangerous enough, but using these texts for making Jesus a model son does not work, does it?     

But there’s one more text I need to address before we back this third word from the cross.  The most non-family friendly words of Jesus were not spoken directly to his family, but to those of us who would be Jesus followers ourselves.  “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luk 14:26 KJV).  You can’t get around how inappropriate this language is for building what we normally think of as “family values.”   Reading what we want to read into the Bible can be misleading.  It’s like the joke about the “uninformed” driver who, who asked the mechanic for some “710” for her car.  When the mechanic looked confused, she pointed down to the upside-down cap in front of them.  As the mechanic focused his eyes, he realized the writing was upside down and OIL can be read 710.   (From: http://www.pagetutor.com/jokebreak/257.html.)

The gospel of Jesus is written to make sure we don’t take anything for granted, especially here, at the cross.   These gospels are written by “evangelists” not family experts.  I’m sad to say that a lot of preachers today feel pressure to preach more like family experts than gospel experts.  But John’s gospel agenda is to preach Jesus and what he does on the cross.   No matter how hard we try to read Jesus into our family matters, Jesus did not come to be a normal, family guy.   Jesus had an agenda to save us, not just renew our family.  And Jesus does not save us in our family by getting us to focus on our family, but Jesus saves us and our families by giving us a new focus.  

JESUS CAME TO MAKE CHURCH A FAMILY

Most of us work very hard to hold our family together, but this does not have a saving effect we wish.  If we are not careful, in our world to save family, we can end up losing them and ourselves in the process.   As we idolizing our children or our families, we forget that when we idolize anything, it becomes destructive instead of redemptive.   Instead of coming to help us hold our families together on human terms, Jesus says he came even to break families apart, and ironically, that is exactly how Jesus intends to put our families back together.  

Jesus came to put us back together not on the terms of “flesh and blood”, but on spiritual terms.  This is exactly the agenda Jesus has on the cross.   He is not simply asking John to care for his mother, but Jesus is creating God’s “new: family focus” and he makes Mary his mother the “mother” of God’s new family, which is the church.   This is why Jesus addresses her as “woman” and as John’s mother.   In this wonderful act of grace, Jesus acts to save his mother by placing her in God’s new family, where God’s new family has future potential and limitless possibilities.  When your earthly family dies or fails you, God’s family is more than a new family “fill in” for those you have loved, but finding love and family in God’s new family has the power to both redeem us, our family, and make both friends and strangers part of the promise of God’s presence in our lives, to be with us always, even to the end, no matter what we face         

In order to get a better handle on what this might mean for us, we can imagine why this moment at the cross was not the first “Mother’s Day.”   Unfortunately, in our churches, we sometimes do a better job as promoting our own “saving our family” agenda, than being adopted God’s family, or letting God adopt us.   Like you I grew up celebrating Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and I have done this for many years for very good reasons.   But let me tell you about a strange feeling I had once while our church in Greensboro was once celebrating Mother’s day a few years ago.  

We were giving roses to all mothers present, not just the oldest, the youngest, or the one with the most children.  We already realized that this could cause all kinds of misunderstandings, like promoting big families or young mothers, so we decided to give a single rose to every mother.  It was my idea.   Then, as we handed out the roses, and as we did I looked out an saw a woman who couldn’t be a mother because of infertility problems.   I looked out again and saw another woman who had a very bad mother struggling with her loss while we celebrated.   Finally, I saw mothers struggling because they were estranged from some of their children.   In that moment, when I was supposed to be celebrating, I couldn’t.  It kind of felt like eating a piece of candy in front of a child and not able to offer them any.  

I know we could say these hurting people who attend our church and struggle with our celebrations of family should stay home, or need to grow up and face their pain and not make the rest of us suffer for their losses.    There is, of course, some truth to this.  But something in me, deeply spiritual and deeply like Jesus, made me feel what I was doing in that moment is was less than what I needed to be doing.   Celebrating my joy of family at the expense of someone else’s loss of family, was not what it needed to be unless I offered them hope.  

It was on Mother’s Day that I realized why Mother’s Day is not in the Bible, nor was it Jesus’ agenda at the cross.   Jesus didn’t come just to be nice to his mother, but came to save his mother.   Jesus doesn’t just want to save those of us who have good families, but Jesus wants to save all of us, those of us with functional or dysfunctional families, and Jesus wants to save us by giving us a “family agenda” even greater than our own biological family.  

I’m not saying that we should stop celebrating Mother’s Day or Father’s Day in our churches, nor we that we should stop promoting family agendas.   I am suggesting, however, that we must remember that the agenda of the church is to both being family by heal each other’s hurts not just claiming or holding on to our personal hopes.   By calling us to a new family focus, expanding and transforming our family, and by even making “strangers” or “disciples” and also “others” our new family in Jesus Christ, Jesus calls us to the gospel that is the only way save our family.  And we don’t save family by holding on obsessively to them, but by letting each other go with roots and wings.   We don’t save our families by playing it safe together, but by taking risks and giving ourselves to something larger than ourselves, and we don’t save our families by just protecting or maintaining them as they are, or forcing them into what we want them to be, but we save ourselves and our family by becoming disciples of Jesus together and giving ourselves to Jesus’ mission for the world.   

This call to save family by giving ourselves to God’s family goes beyond the worn slogan, “The family that prays together, stays together,” and discovers that our family prayers and family altar is what leads us to open our hearts to serve Jesus together and to serve others in Jesus’ name.   Only when we join our family to God’s family, do we live as a people who, no matter what life brings, never run out of faith, never run out of hope, never run out of love and or course, never run out of family in our living and dying.  

In our society, the breakdown of the home and the family unit is one reason it’s getting harder to get people into our own small “family” churches.   They can’t celebrate what we have, because they don’t have what we have.   In order to be church in this kind of fractured, hurting, and broken world, we must be willing to move beyond celebrating what we have and move toward sharing what we have.  If we want to do God’s saving work and be God’s saving work in this world, we’ve got to join our agenda of family with God’s agenda for family.   Only when Mary lets puts her into arms of God’s new family, can she find God’s arms reaching beyond the loneliness and emptiness of the hurt of life.   

JESUS CAME TO MAKE OUR FAMILY A CHURCH

The other thing we see here, at the cross, is that Jesus came not just to make church a family, but he came to make our family a church, which is much more than getting our family into the church, but it is how God gets his “church” into our family.   Let me explain what this means with a story of a family in trouble who once came looking for help from God.  

When I was a pastor in Greensboro, a deacon once came to me requesting prayer for a friend of his, whose family were members of our church, but I had never seen them there.   He told me that the Father in this family was having trouble with his son and did not know how to respond to his “sin.”   Without giving me details of the son’s sin, he told me that the Father didn’t know whether to blame his son for the sin, or blame himself.   He didn’t know whether he should take his son to the “woodshed”, come to church, or go to a doctor.  There were all kinds of questions, all kinds of guilt, and all kinds of worry, anxiety and fear.  

The deacon went on to tell me that the Father needed my advice about before he made his next move.  What should the Father do in this situation?   Realizing already that this was the kind of Father already shifting responsibility by not coming to me himself and by not coming to church with his family, and also realizing, that since the son’s sin was not some “simple” wrong a Father, a preacher, nor even a doctor could correct, but it was the kind of “sin” the prophet said we’ve been “born into” and is also is “born in us” and there is no earthly cure for this kind of sin because, even our righteousness is still filthy rags.  

Because I knew this sin would always be this son’s struggle and this Father’s too, I sent only one bit of pastoral advice.   I told my deacon that what this Father needed to do, before he decided to do anything else as a Father, is become a Christian and follow Jesus.    First, he needed to follow Jesus by forgiving himself as a Father.   Then, he needed to follow Jesus by forgiving his son and God forgives us.   I didn’t mean that he was to condone his son’s behavior or justify it, but I told the deacon to tell him, before he can be the Father he needs to be, he must first be the Christian he needs to be and he needs to forgive. 

 And I would recommend the same to your family troubles, when things fall apart or your family members die, physically or spiritually.  “The forgiveness of sins” expressed fully by Jesus at the cross, is the only salvation we have.   Even before Mary realized what Jesus was doing, she was made a new person and given a new family through God’s mercy and grace.   By following Jesus’ word and letting him make us into new people, we become who we need to be so we can have who we need to have to be and have family in this broken world.

The other day I saw an article sent by email which caught my.  The title made a rather strange and shocking claim:  “Married to Five Women in One Lifetime”!   As I saw that title, all kinds of images popped in my head.  Did this guy have to have five failed marriages learn how to be married?   Was this guy a polygamist?   What was this article mean and why was it in a Christian magazine?

When I started to read the article, it started to make more sense:  The writer, Sam Davidson wrote:

 “Once I realized I would be married to at least five different women in my lifetime, it was a lot easier to get married.

You may think my wife would cringe when reading this statement, but by my count, I've already been married to two different women since Lynnette and I tied the knot in 2004. And she's been married to a handful, too.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'll always be married to Lynnette. But who Lynnette is will change – and should change – over the course of our life together. This is why, when thinking hard about whether or not she was the one for me, I felt confident knowing she'd be someone who would grow and change as I grew and changed.

It was a smart professor and mentor who tipped me off to this notion. He told me, in his “controversial” style, that it would be best for me to be married to many different women.  My conservative self took offense at his suggestion until he broke it down for me. And it made sense.

Certainly I was going to change throughout the rest of my life. Why wouldn't I want to be married to someone who did the same? In fact, to expect someone to stay the same would be ignorant at best and oppressive at worst.

I had just turned 23 when I got married. My 29-year-old self looks at pictures of our wedding day and laughs in retrospect at the people dressed in black and white who said their original vows to one another while a barefoot guitarist strummed a song about stars. Our preacher handed us the rings to put on each other's fingers. We promised simple things to each other and pledged that we'd try our best to make this thing last. The people in the picture, though, are not the same people married today. (http://www.ethicsdaily.com/news.php?viewStory=15678 )

                      

Jesus did not want Mary to remain the same person after his death.   Neither does Jesus want us to say the same or be the same either.  This is why God gives us family at home and at church.  God gives us our earthly ‘family’ to grow us up to be what we can be, and then he gives us His family to save us from our family, and most of all, from ourselves.   This is how Jesus makes us new people and gives us a family that will be there always and forever.

So, now we all stand with Mary and John around Jesus’ cross.   We all have the option to accept Jesus and join ourselves with his new family, or we have the option to walk away in brokenness and face the loneliness that will come.  What God wants for us, however, is what Jesus gave Mary.  Jesus wanted her to see what is broken and make God’s family her family and give herself to the only salvation God gives.   In the same way, Jesus came to give us family that we can hold on to, only when we hold on to God.   Because only in God can we hold to the family that remains “unbroken” in this “broken” world.    Amen.  


© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.