FAMILY VALUES?

Have a look at that picture. It’s the sort of advertising image life insurance companies used in the 50s. You know, If anything happened to you, wouldn’t you want them to be provided for?

It’s the embodiment of idealized “family values”:  the healthy, outdoor, squeaky clean “family unit” of attractive virile dad, rosy-cheeked young mum and two or three cute, fun-loving kids. Same thing today – just substitute an SUV for the roadster.

What ‘s wrong with the set-up? It’s largely fantasy.  LIFE’S JUST OFTEN NOT LIKE THAT.

Some marriages, thank God, last happily. Some children are brought up with unconditional love. But it’s a sad fact that many marriages fail sooner or later. Many children are either unloved or are smothered in possessive affection. Some are abused, physically or emotionally, by their relatives, even by their parents. Single parents, childless couples, bachelors, spinsters, homosexuals all struggle against the odds and against the prejudice of the extollers of “family values”.

None of us should dare to prescribe and impose an ideal and blame other people for not living up to it. If we are from, and in, what we would describe as “happy families”, praise be, but let us never take God’s blessings for granted or judge others in what we might take to be their misfortune or, God forgive us, their ‘sin’.

What does Jesus say in today’s gospel when He is told that His family from Nazareth have arrived? He says Who are my mother and my brothers? [Not necessarily my blood relatives but] Anyone who does the will of God: that person is my brother and sister and mother.

Now let’s get one thing very clear. This is not, and could not conceivably have been intended as, one in the eye for the Mother of God, blessed Mary. It is no more a “hard saying” aimed at Mary than that other verse in Luke Blessed is the womb that bore thee? Blessed rather is the one who obeys the word of God.

Let’s push it a bit further. How about when Jesus says If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother and wife and children, yes, and his own life too, then he can be no disciple of mine.

Is that a hard saying? Well you do wince a bit when you first hear it. But it’s really only a dramatic way of demanding a sense of priority. It simply means PUT GOD FIRST. DO THE WILL OF GOD RATHER THAN ATTACHING FIRST IMPORTANCE TO YOUR HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS.

And PUT GOD FIRST is of course is precisely what blessed Mary His mother, unlike the rest of us, always did.  Be it unto me according to thy word, she said, after swallowing hard at the appearance of the angel Gabriel. So on Our Lord’s reckoning, she is His mother twice over, the one whom God chose to bear Him and the one who does the will of God.

Now suppose we tried to put God first like she always did. What would happen to our “family values”?  I’ll tell you. We would begin to feel very differently about the pain and tragedy of the human condition.

Oh yes, there is pain and tragedy for all of us sooner or later. People may let us down, hurt us, betray us. Even fathers,  mothers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. And we may do the same to them.  We may be misunderstood. Motives may be doubted. Behaviour may be misinterpreted. We may feel lonely, bereft. We may wonder what went wrong, or why we never met the right person, or why our children could not accept that we tried to do the best for them.

Because despite the romantic, apple-pie family ideal, each of us mortals is flawed, fallen and unreliable and we don’t seem to be able to help sometimes letting each other down.

The only hope is to come to believe and trust that there is someone who loves me unconditionally and accepts me for what I am.  That someone is  God.

But coming to believe and trust in His love may not be easy. I can’t see Him. I don’t wake up next to Him. He doesn’t leave a dent in the pillow next to mine.  He can’t give me a physical hug of reassurance. It is a question of prayer, of faith and of grace.

S.John wrote: Those who say “I love God” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they HAVE seen cannot love God whom they have NOT seen.

Well I know what he means - you can’t be horrible to others and convincingly call yourself a Christian! - but I do wonder whether the more important truth is the other way round. That is to say:

you can only give yourself unconditionally to your human family members when you believe and trust that you are unconditionally loved and fully accepted by God. 

Because that gives you the strength and security to offer open, no-strings love to other human beings, to your parents, your children, your spouse or partner, knowing that they may let you down, hurt you, disappoint you, probably through no deliberate fault of their own, but simply because they are unable to meet your emotional demands.

We know it is God’s will that we should love one another and we pray “Thy will be done” but we can’t simply look on it as an order to be obeyed. Nobody can be commanded to love by numbers. S.John also says - and here I think he really has hit the nail on the head - We love because He first loved us.

You see, it is only when we come, through prayer, faith and grace, to know and accept and rely on His unconditional love that we can feel safe in loving our families and all our neighbours in a way that does not look for results, for recognition, for congratulations.

Not that there won’t still be hurt and misunderstanding.

None of us are perfect (or ever will be until that day when we are all finally seated, reconciled and overjoyed, round the Father’s table in heaven).

But if we meanwhile pray to receive the grace of knowing deep down that we are loved and accepted by God, then the first amazing result is this: it dawns on us that our particular, private pain (so and so died; so and so deceived me, so and so turned their back on me) is really just our little bit of a universal pain experienced in different private anguish by each human being, a universal pain which God in Christ came to share, to absorb and to redeem.

So now, once more, who are Christ’s mother and his brothers and his sisters?

The answer is:

the people who know they are loved by God  and so can dare to offer their own love freely to others. Those are the “divine family values” and that is, too marvellous though it sounds,  the divine family - the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the angels, the saints, all the company of heaven, and you and me.