Jesus’ View of Marriage and Family

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Christians are known for their “focus on the family” emphasis. There is even a major Christian organization by that name. But do you know that Jesus himself didn’t focus on the family?

Consider the following passage:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:25

Jesus Said If We are Going to Follow Him We Must Hate Our Families

Taken by itself, the above statement by Jesus on discipleship seems shocking: If we are going to follow Jesus, we must hate our family–our closest loved ones–even to the point of martyrdom. Jesus insisted that love for him superseded love for family. But his seemingly anti-family bent doesn’t stop there. Jesus specifically stated that he came to cause division in homes.

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. 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, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Matthew 10:34-37

Clearly, faith in Jesus caused many family divisions in the history of the early church. As individuals believed in him and followed him, often in the face of extreme persecution, they faced the very real possibility of exclusion from their families. Jesus foresaw this difficult choice his followers would have to make and warned them about it.

But Jesus went even further. He actually encouraged his followers to forego their responsibilities to their aging parents.

“He said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ But the man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.'” Luke 9:59-62

Jesus quartered no excuse to following him, not even fulfilling one’s family responsibilities qualified as an excuse. His demand to love him and follow him was absolute. When his followers did exactly what he asked and left everything to pursue Jesus, he praised them for it.

“Peter answered him, ‘We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?’ Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.'” Matthew 19:27-29

So why did Jesus seem to be hostile to the family as an institution? Was it because his own family experience may have been less than positive? On the surface, it might seem so.

Jesus’ Own Family was Dysfunctional

In a word, Jesus’ family resembled most families today: dysfunctional. While still a boy, his mother and father couldn’t figure him out after he went missing and they issued what was the modern day equivalent of an Amber alert (Luke 2:41-50). Sometime after this, his father died and his mother became a widow and single mom.

In his adult ministry, Jesus’ own brothers ridiculed him and refused to believe in him (John 7:1-8). At one point, Jesus’ mother and brothers even thought he was insane and came to take him away (Mark 3:20). In response to this attempt at being forcibly committed by his family members, Jesus declared that, in contrast to them, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother,” Mark 3:31-34.

Jesus Taught that Marriage is Temporary

Besides being alienated from his family, Jesus never married, had no children, and taught that, contrary to the popular belief of his day, those who were married would see their marriages end at death (Matthew 22:23-30).

Thus, in Jesus’ view, human marriage and family are transient in nature. It is the soul that lives forever, whether in heaven or hell. It is the individual human being that has infinite value. Because people are immortal and intrinsically valuable, they are to be unconditionally and irrevocably loved, irrespective of whether they are a family member or not.

Jesus’ Primary Emphasis was on Believers Loving Each Other

Jesus commanded us to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34-35), not simply to love our spouse as he has loved us, or to love our children as he has loved us. The result of such love goes far beyond the mere intimacy of marriage and family, achieving the very intimacy of the Trinity itself (John 17:20-26). Unlike the transience of marriage and family, the love Jesus commands is a love that starts in this life, but reaches into eternity (1 Corinthians 13:8).

Jesus’ view of the infinite value of the individual in the sight of God and the need for that individual to be loved with an inviolable love led him to his conclusion that “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” Jesus meant this quite literally.

For example, as the oldest son, Jesus was responsible for the care of his mother, Mary. But on the cross, Jesus did not entrust Mary into the care of his four brothers, but into the care of his disciple John, who, we are told, took her into his own household from that day forward (John 19:25-27). This, in spite of the fact that James, Jude and Jesus’ other two brothers came to faith just a few days after Jesus’ death (1 Corinthians 15:7; Acts 1:14). James eventually became head of the Jerusalem church. But it was John who cared for Mary until she died, not James, or any of her other sons!

Jesus was Deconstructing his Entire Social Order

In his radical call to follow him, believe in him and love like him at the expense of family, Jesus was deconstructing the family, and along with it, the clan, the tribe and the nation of Israel itself, hence, the entire social order of his day.

In its place, Jesus reconstructed the family, not as the foundation of the new order, but simply as one expression of it, and a temporary one at that.

It was faith in Jesus, and membership in a group of people who love each other in the deep and profound way he does, that is, the church, that became the foundation of the new order. True, Jesus, and later his apostles, applied this same absolute love to marriage and family (i.e., Matthew 5:31-32; Ephesians 5:22-33; 1 Peter 3:1-7), but it was not seen as the sole, or even the primary, application of that love.

In His New Order of Things, Jesus Made the Family Even Stronger

The irony is that, in replacing the family with the church as the foundation of the new order, Jesus and his apostles made marriage and family stronger than it ever had been. Jesus, for example, shocked his disciples with his strict view of divorce (Matthew 19:1-12) and Paul commanded husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25).

So what did Jesus mean as he died on the cross and asked John to care for his Mother? Was he saying, “I know there are many widows and single mothers in this world, but make sure you take care of my mother”?

Or was he saying something different: “This is the way I want every widow and single mother who believes in me to be treated by my followers”? Scripture proves, and the history of the early church bears it out, that Jesus was saying the latter.

Mary was simply the first of tens of thousands of widows to receive the church’s care. By the end of the second century AD, the church in Rome alone cared for 6,000 widows. The church accomplished what the family had failed to do: care for those in its midst who had no family at all.

Today, the picture is much different. Churches focus almost exclusively on families. Rare is the church that has an effective and ongoing ministry that really serves the needs of the widows and single moms and fatherless children. After all, “the family is the foundation of society.”

Jesus Christ, Not the Family, is the Foundation of Society

Truth be told, that statement is a Christian heresy. Jesus Christ is the foundation of all reality and of all society and he still calls each one of us to radically follow him. He calls us to understand that every person is an infinitely valuable immortal soul and deserves to be loved completely and utterly with the love of Christ.

Membership in an earthly family, as wonderful and blessed as that can be, is still transient and ephemeral. But membership in the body of Christ is eternal. And that is the only thing that counts.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

For the past nineteen years New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free online training site called “Meeting to Meet Needs.”

Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.

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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

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