Manhood is the new black

When Jesus calls James and John they are mending their nets with their father.  They leave the boat and their father, and follow him.

This is no trivial detail – a product of the fact that (unlike Simon and Andrew, in the previous verses) the sons of Zebedee happened to be on a job with their dad on the day when Jesus called them.  It’s a pattern that Matthew keeps returning to through the rest of his gospel.  For the disciples, the call to follow Jesus means literally leaving the family and the family business to travel around Galilee and Judea to go on the road with the itinerant rabbi Jesus.

This side of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, ‘following’ Jesus obviously doesn’t mean wandering around Galilee with him.  But the core question of whether you are prepared to rank your loyalty to him even higher than your loyalty to family (and Jesus ranks that pretty highly) does not fade away at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry.

When Jesus sends his disciples on mission in Matthew 10, he gives instructions that seem to be deliberately intended (eg. v. 18) to anticipate some aspects at least of the mission to the Gentiles that they will be sent out on after the resurrection.  His words in vv. 21-22 and 34-37 about being prepared to endure even the hatred and opposition of your brother or your father or your children are repeated in more general terms in Matt. 24:10.

The ‘leaving’ decision in this age may not always be the decision to leave a secular career for a paid ministry job – in fact for most Christians it won’t be that – but it may be.  Or it may be a decision to do the same job in a different part of the world, for the sake of Jesus and the gospel, or a host of other decisions that involve forsaking comforts and possessions and opportunities in order to serve God’s mission in the world.

The preparedness to ‘leave’ and to be ‘hated’ – even by your own father – is at the heart of what it means to be a disciple.

* David is married to Nicole and is the father of Jacob, Rebecca and Elsie. For work he lectures at Morling College in Sydney.

Jesus came ‘[not] to abolish the Law or the Prophets… but to fulfill them’.  This side of his death and resurrection, as people of the New Covenant, we are no longer under the law of Moses.  But we are still called on by Jesus to live out the fulfillment of Moses’ commandments, written on our hearts by God’s Spirit.  The God who gave the commandments to Moses for Israel is the same God who created the world; the commandments are an application of the wisdom of the creator to the nation Israel (cf. Matt 19:1-12), and although we are not that nation, he is still the same God.  So when Jesus talks to Jewish people in his own day about the commandments of Moses and the way they were to keep them, we need to listen and learn.

When Jesus wanted to give an example of how the people of his day used religious traditions to dodge the word of God, the particular word from God that he picked out to focus on was Moses’ commandment to ‘honour your Father and your mother’.  According to Jesus, God is not impressed by people who use religious commitments as an excuse for avoiding the more difficult and God-honouring task of honouring their parents – really, genuinely honouring them, in a way that costs time and money and continues all the way to the time when they are demented and dying.

We will have some translating to do in order to apply these words of Jesus to our own situation.  We are not under the law of Moses, and we don’t have a ‘korban’ tradition that we could use to hide from it even if we were.  But we worship the same God who commanded the Israelites to honour their fathers and their mothers, and the way we honour Him is tied up with the way we honour them.

God promised as far back as Genesis 12 to bless all the families of the earth through Abraham and his descendants.  The promises that God gave to Abraham went with a serious responsibility to ‘command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice’ (Gen. 18:19).

Raising up children for Abraham and teaching them to walk in his ways was a serious business, and the whole Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi (e.g. Mal. 2:15), is full of reminders of how important God saw it as being.

Which is why John the Baptist’s words in Matthew 3:9 are so jolting.  God doesn’t need Israel and the children of the Israelites.  If he wants to, he can raise up children for Abraham from the stones by the side of the Jordan river.

At one level (a bit like the story of the virgin birth) John’s words function as a huge challenge to human fatherhood and family.  Viewed as an end in itself, human fatherhood and family is an idol that God is perfectly prepared to cut down and bypass.

At another level, John’s words are an urgent call to take the business of raising up children for Abraham a whole lot more seriously.  The fact that God has an axe at the root of the trees, ready to cut down the trees that don’t bear fruit, is not a reason to give up on being a tree.  It’s a reason to bear fruit.

No-one is automatically a child of God, simply by virtue of being born into the right family - this side of the cross, as the gospel goes out to the nations, that is even clearer than it was in John’s preaching.  People enter God’s family not by birth but by the new birth, through the work of the Spirit (cf. John 1:13; 3:6; Rom. 2:29).  But the normal means by which the Spirit works is through God’s word (cf. 1 Peter 1:23), which can be learned from infancy and is able to make a person wise for salvation and equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:15-16).

So whatever else we fathers do in our lives (including our ‘ministry’ lives), we ought to be praying for God’s Spirit to be at work in our kids’ hearts to give them saving faith in Jesus, and teaching them (by word and example, with discipline and patience) what the word of God says and how to believe and obey it.

If we do everything else except those things, then our fatherhood is falling catastrophically short of what it was created for.  John’s words to Israel carry an echo that functions as a warning for us.  God offers no guarantee of permanence to half-hearted faith and obedience half-heartedly passed on from generation to generation.  There is an axe at the root of the tree.