The family in the Bible

If one wants to be true to the Bible, in all its dialogical strength and power, one should come to a true appreciation of the importance and power of the family to the human enterprise. The tension or dialogue between Israel's center in the patriarchal family and the Hellenized Jesus' radical openness to the human family as a whole, can be resolved or understood as a biblical pilgrimage from the Bronze Age to the Greco--Roman which indicates how we ourselves should continue by dynamic analogy on that same route, but in our day. Understanding the Bible as a paradigm or model for how to bring the biblical past into the present in contemporary terms, gives us a map of God's will and desire for the pilgrimage of constantly breaking through old family and tribal limits to new horizons about the worth and responsibility of all families and of all individuals in God's creation.

The Church as a Pilgrimage

Just as prominent as the metaphor of the family for the covenant relationship between God and Israel is the metaphor of Israel or the Church being a pilgrim folk. Moses asked God one day on a desert mountain, "Is it not in your going with us, I and your people, that we are distinct from all other peoples on the face of the earth? (Ex 33:16)" In David's consecration of the massive gifts offered so that Solomon could later build the temple, David prayed thus, "But who am I, and what is this people, that we should be able thus to offer gifts so abundantly? For all things come from you, O God, and of your own have we given you. We are strangers before you, O God, and sojourners, as all our ancestors were; our days on earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding (1Chron29:14-15)." And the psalmist sang, "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry ... For I am your passing guest, an alien, like all my ancestors" (Ps 39:12). Abraham Heschel called it a fatal illusion to assume that a human being is the same as being human. "Being human, he said, means being on the way, striving, waiting, hoping."

The church is a pilgrim people on the way. This should never be understood as a form of escapism--the "this world is not my home" syndrome--but as the essential character of the church, that church called by the Spirit to press on, to be on the move to address ever new challenges, to sing a new song to the glory of God, to break camp morning by morning from where we have been, to seek God's will to live by it, to change what can and should be changed, to accept what cannot be changed, with a prayer for wisdom to know the difference--constantly vigilant to oppose dehumanizing others just because they are different. Such vigilance is to witness to the power of Scripture and of Christ, as led by the Spirit. That is the vocation and the true identity of the human family called forth by God in Abraham and Sarah and expanded in Christ to the whole world.

Jesus was a clear embarrassment to the conservatives of his day. Luke reports that Jesus accepted invitations to many parties in the Galilee and on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. At one such party Jesus showed the depths of God's grace to an uninvited woman who bathed his feet in her tears and kissed them unashamedly in public, as the prime example of what agape (God's love) means (Luke 7:36-50). The long arc from Tamar in Genesis to Jesus' uninvited woman encompasses the Bible. That story in the Gospel ought to shock every one who ever claimed to read the Bible literally, and it ought to shame all of us who forget the radicality of Jesus' teaching and of God's divine love and grace that know no bounds. The key is to theologize first and moralize later, that is, to celebrate God's love and grace first, and then thereafter to ask what we should do about it in the light of that celebration. As Martin Luther and John Calvin both taught, we return to re-read the law after celebrating the Gospel of God's amazing grace and love. The law has its uses, they said, but only after we have celebrated cradle, cross and crown. I submit that this is probably what Christ meant when he said that he had come not to abolish Torah, but to fulfill it.