Family Ties
It has been said: You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family. For better or worse, when we were born into our family, we were born into a culture, a dynamic of relationships and an understanding of who God is. None of us chose our parents, our siblings, or our extended family, but we are born by God’s sovereign choice into a family. Now, we all have sin and every family (including the one in which my wife and I are raising our kids) bears the marks of sin’s brokenness. Through our own selfishness, pride, and me-first inclinations, we stumble in how we treat each other, our kids, and our extended family. Thankfully, the gospel informs us that God’s grace through Jesus covers us and redeems our family even when we don’t realize it. You see, the family, as a God-ordained institution, is a theater for the grace of God. It is in that grace that kids learn the gospel, see it lived out, and come to understand their need for Jesus and His aptness to meet that need.
Have you ever thought about Jesus’ own family? There’s no doubt that Jesus’ family was unique and one-of-a-kind in a major way. Neither you nor I grew up with the Son of God as a sibling and we aren’t parenting the Son of God either. That’s a claim to fame only Mary, Joseph, James and Jude are privileged to. Maybe you grew up and felt your brother or sister was the favorite one in the family, but can you imagine James and Jude living in the shadow of older brother, Jesus? We know almost nothing about Jesus’ childhood and upbringing. We know plenty about the circumstances of his birth (Luke 2:1-20), his circumcision (Luke 2:21), purification and dedication in the Temple (Luke 2:22-24). Abruptly, we are told in v. 41 that Jesus is twelve years old and wowing the teachers of the law at the Temple during the Passover festival. Assuming James and Jude were part of the family by then, how do you think they felt that older brother Jesus was interrupting the family’s journey back home and causing them to backtrack a day’s walk to Jerusalem looking for him? How do you think Mary and Joseph felt having misplaced their son and the Son of God? Jesus’ family was unique, to say the least, and the dynamics of the family are something we can only speculate about. But it must have been wild at times.
The strain on his family wasn’t likely helped when, in his early thirties, Jesus began his formal ministry as a Jewish Rabbi gathering disciples, teaching, and producing a whole bunch of miraculous phenomena. Jesus was no ordinary Jewish Rabbi after all, he was God in the flesh. Place yourself in his brothers’ shoes. This was not a case of your brother just being a pastor, but imagine your brother was working miracles on the regular and drawing thousands to hear him speak and proclaim he was the Messiah. And, there’s the bizarre situation where Mary, James and Jude come and seek out Jesus when he is teaching the multitudes and ask to see him. Jesus responds, in the hearing of everyone in attendance, “My mother and my brothers are all who hear God’s word and obey it.” (Luke 8:21) We aren’t told whether Jesus went to see them after saying this, but the emphasis Luke gives us is that Jesus took the opportunity not to lift up his family in the sight of everyone, but to lift up everyone in the sight of his family, insinuating his mother and brothers were on no higher spiritual footing than those in the crowds who obeyed Jesus.
Jesus’ brothers were born into a very unique and, I’m sure, at times frustratingly confusing set of circumstances. We cannot say whether or not they believed in Jesus as Messiah and Lord before his death, to do so would be an argument from silence. What we can say is that, at his most dire time of need, while he is being crucified, James and Jude are nowhere to be found. Indeed, all of the disciples have deserted Jesus except his mother, his Aunt (also called Mary), and Mary Magdalene (three women ironically all with the same name) and John. Mary (Jesus’ mother) was told before Jesus’ birth that he would be the Messiah (Luke 1:32) and she followed Jesus to the cross. But the same cannot be said for his brothers. Now, Jesus’ brothers became prominent members and leaders in the early church in Jerusalem. James was, at the very least, a leader in the Jerusalem church and highly influential (Acts 15:13-21). And both James and Jude have an epistle to their names in the Bible.
What does all this have to do with us and our families? I think it shows us three main things:
1. Family is God’s design.
God has ordained each of us to be born into a family and, if we are parents, to cooperate with Him in building a family where grace is the rule. Jesus was perfect in every way. But his family he was born into involved people with sin natures and was messy. The presence of Jesus in his family did not mean his family was perfect or sinless. But, God’s grace in that family built a home for the Messiah and Savior of the world. In the end, Jesus would, by God’s grace, die for the sins of his mother and brothers. This was all by design.
2. Families are designed as recipients and agents of God’s grace.
Joseph, Mary, James and Jude all believed in Jesus and are in eternity right now worshiping their son and brother on equal footing with all the redeemed people of God. God designed Joseph, Mary, James and Jude all to fulfill his purposes in Jesus’ family and empowered them to complete his plan for them. He has designed you and your family to fulfill His unique purposes and tell his redemption story. To the extent we lead our children to know and love God, we are simultaneously agents and recipients of his grace.
3. God’s grace works in families generationally.
If you ever wonder why Luke and Matthew spend so much time recording the genealogy of Jesus, this point is for you. Look through Jesus’ family tree and you’ll find a prostitute (Rahab), someone who visited a prostitute (Judah), someone who committed adultery (David), and still others with checkered pasts. Maybe you have a family where sin has reared its destructive head in some major ways. Don’t lose sight of the fact that God works in and through imperfect people in imperfect families to fulfill his perfect plans.
How does God want to use you in your family right now? Where can you identify his grace in your family’s history and today? How can you help your family’s next generation to know and love the God of all grace?