How Do We Live Together in the Struggle

3 HOW DO WE LIVE TOGETHER IN THE STRUGGLE?

THE PROBLEM OF FAMILY

The Present Interest in the Topic

Today I would like to reflect a bit on the problems of family and on how this family in the narrow sense of the word relates to the family of people who are supposed to live together in the new society. I am focusing on family and not only on male/female relationship or women’s liberation because I get the impression that in many Third World countries, it is the problem of the family which is most important. How to relate to one’s parents, to one’s brothers and sisters; how to support all of them; how to get married and found a family for oneself – these are the most pressing problems and male/female relationship is spelled out in this context.

The family is of particular importance in societies where scarcity is only too evident. Where one or two alone cannot manage, a whole clan sticking together can. This is why a forced family planning drive meets with much resistance and resentment. Children, in Asian societies, are not considered a burden but first of all a joy, a promise of wholeness and newness. And in later years they are those helping hands that can cope with the innumerable chores to be fulfilled to keep a family going: collecting cow dung or firewood, sorting stone out of the rice, picking useful things from the garbage, working on a small plot of land, earning a few paisa by doing odd jobs, looking after the younger children – all these done by the growing children.

The fourth commandment, “Honour thy father and mother", is connected with a promise: so that you may live long in the land which the Lord your God gives you. To live long in an oriental society with evident scarcity is only possible if one has children who loyally look after their parents. So the respect for the elders, for the family as a whole, grows out of the need for self-preservation.

But it is not only the outer pressing need which is there. The family in Asia means genuine affection. If my students want to say something particularly kind, they will say I am like a mother to them. Of course I used to shrink back from this emotional expression since I am conditioned to have the normal western bias

against paternalism and maternalism and authoritarianism and all that. But there are genuine values of acceptance and affection expressed in this relationship and therefore the breaking up of traditional patterns of family is particularly painful.

In many Asian societies there is hardly any place for single persons. The pressure on people to get married is overwhelming. And if they do not manage to get married, they are extremely unhappy. If the marriage goes wrong, there is hardly any room for divorce. Often the family pattern can be very rigid. The pressure of authority can weigh very hard on the young ones. The scope for change and innovation may be very narrow. Yet, to break away means not only economic insecurity but may also be very heartbreaking.

In the context of the struggle for liberation, the problem of family poses itself anew in a very sharp way. Young people who go out to work in villages or slums often do not have the approval of their family. If they come from bourgeois family they sometimes try to make a neat cut and simply stop communication. But they will suffer from this for many years. And if they are from poor families, the situation is even worse because the need for security and support is greater then and the feeling of not being able to meet one’s obligations is extremely agonising. Another problem arises with respect to the people with whom one works. A single young man, let alone a single girl, working in a place is hardly acceptable. People will start asking: Where are your relatives? Why do they not visit you? Suspicion may grow that something is “wrong”. If the young people who go and work in villages and slums are Christians, there is the additional pressure of the church on them.

The Ideal of the “Christian Family” and the Life of Jesus

Christmas is mainly celebrated as a family festival and I remember having sung in an English-speaking parish these sweet lines about the child Jesus:

“And through all his wondrous childhood

He would honour and obey,

Love and watch the lowly maiden,

In whose gentle arms he lay;

Christian children all must be

Mild, obedient, good is he.”

So it may be worth asking whether this sort of moral exhortation is very true to the gospels. The relationship which Jesus had towards family is very ambiguous to say the least. His birth has very much the taste of the birth of an illegitimate child. Our preaching tends to gloss this over. On Family Sunday, pastors love to preach on the marriage at Cana (Jn. 2) in order to emphasize how much Jesus cherished family life. Of the report on the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple (Lk. 2: 41-52), we usually remember best verse 51 saying that he came to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents but we tend to overlook the fact that he had no apologies to make when his mother asks: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” (v.48) He only replies: “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?” (v.49). The loyalty to God is of a higher order than the loyalty to the family. The harsh fact is stated right from the beginning and it is the prevailing line not only in Jesus’ life but also in what he expects from his disciples.

When Jesus starts teaching, he not only remained unmarried much against the customs of his time but he also left behind the family business of carpentry and starts to roam about preaching. Not only this. When he calls the disciples to follow him, he disrupts other families! At the Sea of Galilee, he calls the fishermen to leave their nets and Peter and Andrew follow him. Also the sons of Zebedee, James and John, of whom it is said explicitly: they left their nets and their father (Mt.4:18-22, Mk. 1:16-20).

Jesus on the whole lacks respectability. That Jesus was moving about with tax collectors and sinners (Mk.2:13-17, Mt.9:9-13, Lk.5:27-32) is commonplace. That there were many women following him is widely known. Not all of these women are housewives and mothers wefl adjusted to the classical role. Between the two sisters, Mary and Martha, Jesus encourages Mary who behaves like a male disciple listening at the feet of the master and not serving him in the way of women (Lk. 10:38-42). Jesus unmasks the double standard of contemporary family life when he asks the Pharisees and scribes to throw the first stone on the adulterers whom they brought before him provided the accusers are without guilt (Jn.8:l-ll).

The Cost of Discipleship

Some of the harshest texts on the costs of discipleship deal with the disruption of cherished family patterns. Jesus does not feel any closer relationship with his kith and kin than with those who follow him. When once his mother and his brothers came and sent for him while he was in a meeting, he did not acknowledge their claim on him, but looking around in the circle where he was sitting, he said: “Behold, these are my mother and brothers. Whoever does God’s will is my brother, may sister and my mother.” (Mt. 12:46-50, Mk.3:31-35, Lk.8:19-21). But even worse, the announcement that Jesus has not come to bring peace but discord and even the sword and a raging fire stands in the context of breaking the bonds of blood. (Mt. 10:34-38, Lk. 12:51-53 and 14:26, 27)

The text in the somewhat milder version of Matthew reads: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth, I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” In Luke 14: 26 f, the text reads: “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” It is clearly acknowledged that to cut the bonds of blood implies a loss of identity. Yet, this loss of identity and security is part of taking up the cross and gaining new life.

Even the most fundamental acts of filial duty are denied to one who comes to follow Christ (Lk.9:57-62, Mt.8:19-22). A man comes and as Jesus says to him, “Follow me”, he first wants to bury his father. But Jesus says: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” To another one, who wants at least to say farewell to his relatives at home, he says: “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.”

The Gains of Discipleship

All this really sounds frightening. It sounds as if we are supposed to think that Jesus and the disciples were a group of uprooted ascetics who had stripped themselves of all natural emotions and human relationships and were completely neglecting any normal life, concentrating all their energies on the coming of the Kingdom of God. But, of course, this could be a very narrow and distorted picture which only shows the disruption and not the healing, the new life which grows out of it. The harsh text on leaving one’s father and mother and brothers and sisters and wife and children and, even hating them, has a counterpart which tells of the new human relationships which are growing out of discipleship.

Peter once asked Jesus what he would gain since he had left everything behind in order to follow him. And Jesus replied (Mk. 10:28-31, Mt. 19:27-30, Lk. 18:28-30): “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come, eternal life.” The text is put into the context of the question who of the disciples will be the first in the Kingdom of heaven. But in fact the answer as it is has nothing to do with pious ranking, with a hierarchy of saintliness. It speaks of the restitution of human life in full warm relationships. The genuine values of love, affection and acceptance are restituted even under persecution. It is no longer the bonds of blood which provide a sense of belonging but the bonds of discipleship. The bonds are secondary to discipleship. They may be disrupted and destroyed. They may break in hatred. But they may even be strengthened if discipleship is lived by a whole family.

The New Family

The disruption of family bonds through discipleship – and today this may often mean through a political commitment – does not mean that the fourth commandment has become invalid, that the young would not have to care for the old, or that there would be no place for children. The fourth Gospel tells of Jesus commanding his mother to the care of John under the Cross (Jn. 19:25-27). Disciple-ship apparently means also to share in each other’s family responsibilities.

It is also important to note that Jesus was keen that there should be a place for children. He repeatedly emphasised that the Kingdom of God belonged to the children, apparently because they were unpretentious and candid and simple and not bothered about their religious merit and ranking in the Kingdom of God (Mt.l8:l-4, Mk.9:33-37, Lk.9:41-48). The text which reports how Jesus tells the disciples not to rebuke the children but let them come to him because to them belongs the Kingdom of God 9Mt. 19:13-15, Mk. 10:13-16) is often taken as a text to justify the baptism of children. But it is rarely taken in its critical sense which is questioning the hierarchy of age and authority in the family as well as in all sorts of social or religious organisations.

So the new society and the new form of family in which the children of God are supposed to live is one in which the bonds of blood have lost their importance but in which the genuine values of family life find a new place and meaning. It will not be the well organised society of individualistic free personalities who shut their parents off in homes for the aged and keep their children from their involvements. The vision of the prophet Zachariah is still valid (Zach.8:4,5). “Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem each with staff in hand for every age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets.” The old people and the children are not isolated from the mainstream of life; they are present in the streets and in the market place, the centre of communication.

I think if we take the life of Jesus and the disciples seriously, it will give us a broader and more critical understanding of our patterns of life. It will help us to understand that generation conflicts are nothing to be ashamed of but may be part of discipleship. It will teach us that the traditional roles in the family, the male/female relationship and the authority of old-age and ranking are incompatible with the freedom of the children of God. The life of Jesus will make us critical of bonds of family which only serve self-preservation, the safeguarding of property and inheritance. It will make us critical of families who shut us off from others and keep us away from commitment. But it will also teach us that responsibility for the old and for the young and for those who are in any way weak and in need of shelter is thrust upon all of us. The responsibility has not become less; it has become more.

We are responsible not only for our kith and kin but for all. Intermarriage and eating on the same table are only a first step to the new community. We will have to devise new ways of living together in solidarity in new joint families which are based on a shared commitment.