This past Thanksgiving, my wife and I had both of our families gather together as we celebrated our first holiday as a married couple. It was a really special time where we had amazing food, fun, and fellowship. As we were heading back home to DC, we both told each other that when we are with our respective families we really make much more sense.
She makes more sense when she is with her family because I get a deeper sense of who she is at her core. I watched her and her siblings share inside jokes and retell stories, and suddenly the things she tried to share with me that I didn’t find funny, were hilarious to them. I also got to see them have deeper moments as they shared stories about neighborhood friends who were struggling or in despair, folks battling diseases and unhappy relationships. When I saw her in the midst of her family, I got to see where her heart was and how these people made her into the person she is.
In the same way, she shared with me that she loved being with me when I was with my family. She saw how being in the kitchen with my mom was energizing and how listening to me talk politics with my dad it was clear how they shaped me. She saw how when my siblings and I gathered, though very different in personalities and interest, we all shared the same a heart, a heart that loves people and our world deeply. Lauren, my wife, told me that when I was with my family it was almost as if all of the values that had been under the surface bubbled up and she could clearly see the person I truly was.
If being around our respective families could teach my wife and me so much about each other, I wonder what we could learn of Jesus if we got to know his family better. So often in our practice of the Christian faith we treat Jesus as if he was born and raised unto himself and changed the world simply because of his will or relationship with God. Too often we read the stories about the life of Jesus in our western individualist context in which it is all about him and say nothing about the community which formed him and instilled values into him to help make him the liberating king he needed to be.
In the Gospel lectionary texts this week and next we have an opportunity to learn just a bit more about Jesus’ family and the values they held dear.
First, we will learn about his mother, Mary, the matriarch of our faith. Although, most widely known for virginity, Scripture however tries to teach us something else about Mary — it tries to show us that she was radical, had a heart for her people and wanted liberation herself. Once she hears that her son will become their king, she doesn’t refute the need for a liberator. Instead, she welcomes him almost as though she has been working for, expecting, and hoping for one to come. It is almost as though she clearly sees the evil in her world, is overwhelmed by her Facebook timeline, and is looking for someone to come and reverse the social order. In her song, she says that God has lifted up the lowly and sent the rich away empty handed. It is clear that Mary has a liberation ethic and I don’t think she quit singing her song when Jesus got older.
Then we will hear Joseph’s story in the Gospel of Matthew. Short of being just Jesus’ reluctant and skeptical stepfather, a closer reading of Matthew’s introduction shows us a different Joseph, too. When he hears about Mary’s conception, even when he initially believes it to be through infidelity, his plan is to still try to be the most just he can be towards her. He realizes the power he has, even when he is hurt and doesn’t want to abuse it. Scripture calls him righteous for how he attempts to handle this situation. His devotion to justice is seen clearly as he contemplates breaking the letter of the law to save his beloved from humiliation and grace. Joseph has a liberationist ethic that I don’t think Jesus could have escaped.
Combined together these scriptures that lift up Mary and Joseph offer a radical insight into the choices of God when read through a liberationist lens. God becomes flesh and puts himself within the context of a family whose values God already shares. Mary and Joseph are Jesus’ liberation teachers. They are the ones who orient Jesus to the pains of those suffering in Nazareth. They are the ones who take him to Zechariah and Elizabeth as they discuss what it means to live in the Jerusalem slums as another dark Hebrew boy is murdered at the hands of Herod. They are the ones who bring him to the temple to study Isaiah 61 and liberation theology. It is Mary and Joseph who reject the values of their culture and instead pursue liberation values and expose those values to a young and growing Jesus. It is Mary, Joseph, and their entire community of faithful God fearing radicals who play as important a role as any in the making of our liberating king when they remind him that Spirit of the Lord is upon him.
This Advent, as many of us still process the despair of our political time and as we wait again for the signs, if any, of our Liberating King, let us remember Jesus’ family and the values they hold dear — values of liberation, justice, peace and love. Let us remember how they trained Jesus in the ways of those values and helped him to see the suffering of his people and how it was necessary for him to intervene on behalf of the marginalized. This Advent, let us not despair because of the evil in our world, but instead let us make Jesus’ family’s values our own.