“Jesus said, ‘I have come to set a man against his father’” (Mt. 10:35).
You can thank the lectionary for assigning that verse for this Sunday, Father’s Day, just one verse in a Gospel passage that make foes from members of one’s own household (including daughters against their mothers and in-laws against everyone else).
My gratitude is really quite sincere for this lectionary mashup with the secular calendar. In this mashup, Matthew’s Jesus invites directly a particularly haunting question not only for Christian faith generally but for this LGBTQ Pride Month: what in the world (quite literally) does “family” have to do with “faith”?
If that question doesn’t nudge you awake at night, some of the related ones from that passage might: Why does Jesus use slavery as an illustrative analogy for discipleship (especially in a week with Juneteenth in it)? What does Jesus mean by insisting he doesn’t bring peace but a “sword”? How does one “take up a cross” for life?
Questions about family suddenly seem more manageable. So let’s begin there.
Back in the late 1980s, when the so-called “Religious Right” (with figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) conducted public battles in a culture war against lesbian and gay people, they insisted on the primacy of “traditional families” and the need for “biblical values.”
Those pithy slogans raised some obvious questions: exactly which biblical families should we emulate today? The one God blessed for King Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3)? Or perhaps we should follow the example of both Jesus and St. Paul, who remained single for their entire lives; Paul even urged the readers of his letters to remain unmarried like himself (1 Cor. 7:8-9). Let’s not forget that “traditional” biblical families also made wives little more than property, and men as “lords” of their household (which, frankly, some men today would prefer).
These mismatches between ancient families and modern ones urge those of us who still care about a biblically rooted faith to consider carefully what exactly we’re supposed to do with the Bible in today’s world. Biblical scholar and theologian Walter Wink, for example, proposed that we set aside any attempt to adopt a “biblical sexual ethic”—there really is no such thing. As Wink notes, biblical books reflect a wide range of cultural customs and social mores, none of which fit neatly into a single paradigm of sexual morality. Indeed, many of the sexual practices of those ancient societies would be woefully out of place today: eleven-year-old girls getting married, for example, or the prohibition against marrying outside one’s own “tribal circle.”
Rather than trying to make the Bible into a coherent rule book for a “sexual ethic,” Wink urged us instead to develop a biblical “love ethic.” By this, he meant that we need to engage in a process of shared discernment about what care and compassion look like in loving relationships for today’s world, the kind of foundational values we might more readily carry into a variety of temporal and cultural contexts. That would make biblical discernment both more difficult and more rewarding than just reading a Bible verse and doing what it “says” (that’s mostly how I was raised to think about the Bible and with pretty grim results).
This week’s lectionary collision with the secular calendar can invite us still deeper and invite us to wonder about the social shape of the world we now inhabit. How much about today’s household economics and political convictions (all of which infuse whatever we mean by “family”) do we just assume as “natural” or “normative” when they might actually be corrosive and impairing?
More pointedly, to those who still insist that lesbian and gay couples disrupt “traditional families,” we can (gently) remind them that Matthew’s Jesus already did that a long time ago. We might even insist that the patriarchal household of the ancient Mediterranean world was not at all compatible with the “good news” about the coming Kingdom of God that Jesus preached—which certainly poses some potentially awkward questions about the dynamics of White Patriarchy in the modern West.
Or how about this: rather than the form of a family, perhaps a Gospel-rooted approach can prompt us to ponder what we want to value about a whole range of family configurations: how do we love, and for whom do we care, and where does compassion lead us? Surely questions like that reside at the very heart of politics itself and nearly every decision about public policy.
Maybe Matthew’s Jesus sounds harsh because the consequences of “baptizing” cultural norms chart a path that’s eventually far more destructive (thus his urging not to fear those who kill the body but can’t kill the soul). So if there’s nothing especially “sacred” about the “nuclear family” of modern Western society, then there’s certainly nothing sacrosanct about male privilege or white dominance—which is of course putting the matter far too mildly. White patriarchy stands as the antithesis of the Christian Gospel and opposing it comes with a hefty price tag. Matthew seems especially attuned in that regard to the cultural blowback the first-century Jesus Movement should have expected in their witness to the Gospel. (That “witness” today would surely include the potent interweavings of race and sexuality for a “queer Juneteenth.”)
In my view, that’s the essence of the Gospel’s queerness, especially in the American history of the modern West in which Christian faith has appeared as mostly the religious patina on patriotism. That’s why I’m so grateful to the lectionary for this particular passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel on this third Sunday in June. What if Pride Month invites more than merely “tolerating” the presence of LGBTQ people? What if the “queerness” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people provokes a realization about the queerness of Christian faith itself?
I have struggled for many years now with that word queer and how disturbing and dismaying it is to many, and rightly so—its original meaning in sixteenth-century Scottish contexts meant “odd” or “off-center,” and evolved into a slur for people who don’t “fit in” for any number of reasons, and then finally in the nineteenth-century it became attached to what some considered “perverse” sexual practices or gendered identities. But precisely because of that unsettling history, queerness can inspire our shared work as Christians to recover the destabilizing and energizing character of the Gospel for our own day. (I attempted to do exactly that in my book Peculiar Faith, for which this blog is named; a review of that book soon after it was published still offers a helpful summary.)
It is certainly quite telling that so many will struggle and even become alarmed when Matthew’s Jesus seems to undermine “traditional families” but hardly blink an eye when that same Jesus concludes this coming Sunday’s lectionary passage by telling his followers to take up their cross, follow him, and lose their lives—which he says is the only way to find true life. Have we really forgotten just how queer—that is, how odd, peculiar, jarring, disruptive, and revolutionary—that Gospel exhortation truly is? Which sounds “queerer” to you, that families are disrupted or that we have to die in order to live?
This Father’s Day, the third Sunday in LGBTQ Pride Month, and right on the heels of Juneteenth, Matthew’s Jesus declares that the Gospel will set sons against fathers and daughters against mothers and basically overturn every social bond that gets in the way of true liberty and genuine flourishing and the thriving that God intends for all.
This is a truly strange mashup of texts and dates—let it be strange, just as strange as it wants to be. After all, the Gospel is meant to be transformative, for the sake of life.
