Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Family,” as I noted earlier, is a mantra-like American word, guaranteed to evoke a flow
of profit and a flood of warm feeling. To find this domestic piety in such a robustly Christi-
an nation is odd, since the New Testament displays a marked hostility to the family. Jesus,
Mary and Joseph are a curious parody of one. As a child, Jesus wanders off to teach in the
Temple, making it clear to his distraught parents that his public mission takes precedence
over his domestic affections. He is careful to point out that his apparent father is not his
real one. His parents do not seem to be among his immediate comrades, though his mother
shows up at his execution and his brother James ran the church in Jerusalem (he, too, was
later to be executed). When a woman in the crowd calls out a blessing on the womb that
bore Jesus and the breasts that suckled him, he responds with an acerbic put-down.
At one point, his family members want a word in his ear while he is on public business,
but Jesus tells them peremptorily to wait. A few of his relatives even try to lay violent hands
on him, claiming that he is “beside himself.” Perhaps they regarded him as a dreadful em-
barrassment, hardly an unusual attitude among family members. Having a family himself
would simply have interfered with his mission. It had nothing to do with hostility to sex.
His commitment was to humanity as a whole, not to his uncles and aunts. A prospective
disciple who asks to say goodbye to his family before joining Jesus's movement receives
the rough edge of his tongue. Another who asks to be allowed to bury his father before
joining up is abruptly advised to let the dead bury their dead. The phrase would no doubt
have horrified the Jews around Jesus, who regarded burying the dead as a sacred duty. It
might well have sounded to them like a moral obscenity.
Jesus has come, he declares, to tear family members one from the other and set them
at each other's throats. A follower of his, he insists, must hate his parents. Some of his
disciples today might find this the least arduous of his commandments. If they had been
around at the time, advertisers and politicians would have fallen over themselves to shut
him up. As it is, the Roman state did it for them, probably at the bidding of a badly rattled
colonial ruling elite. Jesus's attitude to the family is good neither for business nor political
stability. The American cult of the family is part of the country's religious legacy. Domest-
ic bliss is a key feature of puritan ideology. It is not at all central to the New Testament.
It is also strange to find American Christians so grimly preoccupied with sex, since there
is almost nothing on the subject in the New Testament. One of Jesus's most loyal com-
rades seems to have been a prostitute, and he himself shows tenderness to a woman from
Samaria with a disreputable sexual history. Since Samarians counted as fairly low-life fig-
ures among the Jews, the fact that he has dealings with her at all is pretty remarkable. He
does not rebuke the woman for her exotic sexual career, but offers her the waters of etern-
al life, which she gratefully accepts. In general, the New Testament is fairly relaxed about
sexuality. This is one of the many ways in which its adherents have betrayed it.
The Unromantic Irish
Search WWH ::
Custom Search