One Utah

In Mormonland where I live, nothing is more certain than that God loves families, eternally procreative Ward and June Cleaver clones with, as our Sutherland Institute so felicitously puts it, “a quiver full of kids.” A happily married husband and father of four myself, I too like families. What I’m having trouble understanding is where God fits into all of this, because I just don’t see a lot of support for traditional family values in God’s track record, proponents of Proposition 8 notwithstanding. In theory, in Constitutional theory, that is, it should be irrelevant to makers of American law what God thinks, or is said to think, about anything. As a matter of historical curiosity, however, I can’t resist taking a look at what the Bible, that wonderful text “so little read in so many places at so many times” (Thomas Greene) has to say on the subject. For brevity’s sake, let’s focus specifically on what God’s Son says about families in the New Testament.

Let’s start with an episode that Luke relates, “Once when great crowds were accompanying [Jesus], he turned to them and said, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine.’” And let’s not forget the always heartwarming, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother….”

On another occasion, a follower begs Jesus to let him bury his father. Jesus replies, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement of a family value that Jews and pagans alike regarded as the essence of piety (compare, for example, Aeneas, famed for the duty he showed his elderly father, Anchises, or Joseph who brings Jacob’s bones back from Egypt for burial).

In still another story, Jesus, again surrounded by a large crowd, is told that his mother and brothers are standing outside and would like to talk to him. He replies, “‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers.’” To others who bragged about their own genealogical credentials, he said, “I tell you that God can make children of Abraham from these stones” and “Alas for you Chorazin! Alas for you Bethsaida! If the miracles performed in you had taken place in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” So much for chosen genes.

Jesus walked the talk as well. He was famous, INFAMOUS, for hanging out with the scum of Palestinian society: tax gatherers (as popular then as loan sharks today, and about as trustworthy), prostitutes, suspiciously unattached women, adulterers, and drunks. “Well, he was social worker,” you say, “out to help them.” Had Jesus converted a lot of prostitutes and drunks into upstanding citizens, it’s hard to see why he wouldn’t have earned the thanks of the establishment. As it is, they seem to have regarded him with suspicion. Either he wasn’t very successful, or he didn’t particularly care about their behavior so long as they followed him. Not the sort of example of family values folks today want to see for their kids.

In fact, Jesus is the poster child for unconventional, not to say unsettling behavior. He’s the son of the world’s most famous single mom, who in her own right, quite apart from the question surrounding her first maternity, appears to have enjoyed turning religious authority on its head. The God she praises routs the proud, overturns monarchs, raises the lowly, and sends the rich away hungry. Like mother like son.

Obviously not insensitive to the scandalous nature of Jesus’s origin, the first gospel tellers flaunt it. Jesus is born in a manger. His birth is communicated first to shepherds, lowliest of all working stiffs. Not a person dressed for success in sight.

In general, when you look at Jesus’s words and deeds, it’s hard to find anything conventional, anything that wouldn’t have been a snub to traditional values, family or otherwise. In Mormonland, good folks carry a “temple recommend” that certifies the bearer’s worthiness to enter the church’s most sacred building, the temple. In Jesus’s day, the temple recommend holders were the Sadducees. But it’s not a Sadducee who is the hero of Jesus’s parable of model behavior, but a Samaritan. In none of Jesus’s stories and sayings do “good folks” come off as anything but hypocrites.

Jesus seems to have been intent on turning convention on its head. It’s the poor, the meek, and the sorrowful, not the successful, the confident, and the happy whom Jesus calls blessed. Indeed, according to Jesus, it is as hard for a successful businessman to enter heaven as it is for a camel to pass though the eye of a needle, a statement, we’re told, that blew his hearers away.

Jesus viewed his own role in similar terms. He is the “true vine,” not the whip, the “shepherd,” not the CEO, the “lamb going to slaughter,” not the warrior, the “servant,” not the master, the “son of man,” not God. The ultimate expression of his life, a chosen self-expression, it appears, was to be crucified naked with other disturbers of the peace.

On the ONE occasion when Jesus, perhaps Scripture’s most singular non-conformist, says anything about sex, it is to tell an adulteress that he does not condemn her.

Perhaps today’s self-appointed upholders of the moral status quo should consider the radical implication of their Scripture. The man they worship, to the extent he cares at all about sex and its ramifications, is concerned only to invite us radically to question basic assumptions.

This entry was posted Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am and is filed under Bigotry, Civil liberties Infringement, Homophobia, Sex, Utah Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.