The Family: God's Idea

A young mother went down to her baby’s nursery one night and was surprised to find her husband peering down at their newborn child. She could tell he was captivated by the scene as he stood there looking at their beautiful sleeping infant. She was so touched that she tiptoed up behind him and slipped her arm through his, saying, “Honey, what are you thinking about?" And he said, “I just can’t believe we got this crib for under a hundred dollars!”
A woman was surprised by her 7 year old grandson one morning. He had made her coffee. She proceeded to then drink the worst cup of coffee in her life. When she got to the bottom there were three little green army men in the cup. She said, "What are the army men doing in my coffee?" Her grandson said, "Grandma, it says on TV, “The best part of waking up is soldiers in your cup.”
To live in relationship with other human beings is God’s design. It is his intent for us to give and receive love from others—especially from those who share each day with us—the people we call family.
Today’s reading from Genesis shows the Lord putting the first family together. “It is not good for man to be alone,” said the Lord, and so he created Eve to be with Adam. This is no small thing. We are created to need relationship with others. Psychologists continue to report what the Bible has said from its opening chapters: It is not good for us to be alone. The more healthy relationships we have, the better off we’ll be. By the Lord’s design, that network of relationships begins with our family. The Bible paints a clear picture: He gave a man and a woman to one another, to share love, companionship, and to know the joy of creation with the blessing of children, and to know the further joy of their ongoing care.
There’s just one problem, and it’s a doozy; the problem of sin. The first family disobeyed God and put their wishes before His; the results: agony in childbirth; hard toil in the fields; and eventually, death. With the introduction of sin, you can see the relationship between Adam and Eve starting to crack. Once their sin is discovered, they start playing the blame game. That’s really a rather familiar pattern, isn’t it?
Sin had and still has a devastating effect on the relationships that matter most to us. In an awful perversion of God’s intent, sin can twist the relationships meant to nurture us into relationships that damage us. The very people who were meant to love and serve us instead hate and harm us, giving us permanent scars in our souls. This is not the way things are supposed to be. Jesus makes that abundantly clear in the Gospel lesson, where he condemns the practice of easy divorce, using phrases from Genesis to set up this statement: What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. Sin leads to the disintegration of relationships; the disintegration of relationships, especially in the family, leads to disintegration of our society; this is one of the most profound “ripple effects” of sin, and it affects everyone. You would be hard pressed to find someone whose life has not been made miserable by the implosion of a family, whether their own or someone else’s.
Sin complicates even the best of relationships. The fact is that by nature we sin against others every day. That means we have more opportunities to sin against our families than anyone else. We want to have our way. We can be needless cruel to those we profess to love. We have a hard time remembering Scripture, but we can remember how a family member “stepped on our toes” in exquisite detail. It would seem that our family relationships are doomed to fail. They would be, if it were not for the intervention of Jesus Christ in our lives.
The Son of God submitted to His Father’s will. In the words of the writer of Hebrews, for a little while, he was made lower than the angels. He became truly human, for the purpose of “tasting death for everyone.” That means that by becoming human and suffering and dying on a cross, he tasted the death of our selfishness. He tasted the death of our sin—the sin that wreaks havoc on our relationships. He tasted our death—the death that we should have died for hating instead of loving—an eternal, awful death—a death whereby relationship with God the Father is broken. He tasted it for you and me. He tasted it and he swallowed it, and it killed him. Yet in doing so, death was swallowed up forever, and when Easter rolled around, and Jesus walked out of that tomb very much alive, things would never be the same for his people again. You see, Jesus’ death and resurrection means that our sin has been swallowed up. It’s gone. We are forgiven an insurmountable debt. That means there is a new beginning available to you, truly a new life to live. It is what some call “the Jesus life,” a life that has accessed our hearts and minds through Baptism and the Word of God. Because Jesus loves you, and proved his love for you by being nailed to the cross for you, He is not ashamed to call you his brother. He is not ashamed to call you his sister. He is the way to love our brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, relatives and friends. See how Jesus expresses His love by humbly serving his disciples with a towel and a bowl. See how Jesus speaks the truth in love to his friends and followers. See how Jesus lays down his life for his friends; dying to self and dying for them. See how he forgives, even as our sin nails him to the tree of life. Service. Telling the truth. Sacrificing. Forgiving. Relationships thrive when Jesus is allowed to be part of them, because he brings these qualities to the table. Let Jesus into your relationships. I’m convinced that the primary place that we live out our Christian faith is in our families. Yes, we have more opportunities to sin against our families than anyone else, but that also means we have more opportunities with them to really exercise our Christianity. That happens when we confess our sin to one another and practice the art of speaking and living in forgiveness with one another. We can only do this because Jesus is not ashamed to call you his brother or sister. We can only do this because he proved that love by dying and rising. But that means we can do this, by the baptismal power that connects us to our Savior. Our family can be an oasis of forgiveness and unconditional love. Jesus has already begun to reverse the mess created by Adam and Eve and the serpent’s temptation. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil—the tree that brought so much sin and heartache into the world, has been trumped by the Tree of Life, the cross of Jesus, the Son of God, our brother who loves us.