Chapter Fourteen

Free to Be Family

We tend to remember the storms that threatened our lives more than the rains that saved them. In the same way, we tend to remember the big crises and turning points in our lives more than those routine, ordinary graces that sustained us along the way.

As a preacher, I don’t like to think about how few sermons I remember from over the course of my life. I remind myself that preaching isn’t about memorable epiphanies, but the slow, plodding formation of a psyche around the constant confrontation with the Word of God. Whether I remember them or not, they are still there, somewhere within me. But there’s just one particular sermon. I heard, over twenty years ago now, a Welsh pastor preaching from the text on the thief on the cross, and his words haunt me still. Pointing to Luke’s account of the repentant robber, crucified next to Jesus, the preacher said, “If that thief on the cross had any family members who were God-fearers, they probably expected that he went to hell.” After all, the worst place one could end up in this life was on a Roman cross, and that cross was probably the end-point of a long, hard, rebellious life. “If there were such believing family members, they were probably shocked, upon waking up in the presence of God, to find the last person they ever expected to be walking in the light of God’s eternal grace.” I’m not sure why these handful of sentences arrested me so. I suppose it was because I never thought of the thief on the cross as having a family, and because it reminded me of just how often I am close to giving up on people I think are, somehow, too far gone for the mercy of God.

That sermon has persisted with me over the years. Those funerals I mentioned earlier still annoy me, those affairs in which we all pretend that the deceased, whoever the deceased is, was a faithful Christian, no matter the evidence to the contrary. And yet, my cynicism is bounded in by the echoes of that old sermon. In every situation, there’s the possibility that, just as that thief on that cross, this person grasped, maybe even in the final seconds of breath, the good news he had heard somewhere back there in a Sunday school class or at a revival meeting or in the pages of a Bible read trying to go to sleep in a hotel room. We can never know, this side of Judgment Day. But we can know that God often surprises us and often appears in the moments that seem the most desperately hopeless. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” the dying thief gasped (Luke 23:42). He gave up his illusions that he somehow could stand on his own. He confessed that his sentence was just, but, even so, he looked up for the possibility of mercy. And he found it. “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise,” was the response he heard from the blood-soaked Galilean (Luke 23:43).

Nowhere could seem further from Paradise, there at the Place of the Skull. And yet, Jesus could see it from there. In the brokenness and horror of the cross, this thief found the glory of a gracious God. In order to find it, though, this man had to toss aside all the strategies he would use to protect himself. The other thief, after all, still postured, maintaining his own rightness, sarcastically demanding that Jesus save himself, and them. The broken thief saw, though, what the defiant thief could not. Paradise could not be found by displays of power. Paradise could only be found by turning his face away from the crowds, away from himself, and toward this One they said that just might be the Christ of God. After a life of searching for God-knows-what, he found life and peace and freedom by crying out to God knows Who. That’s our story too.

* * * *

Some of you are reading this book because you’ve been hurt by the family. Maybe you’re a scarred child, a failed parent, an unfaithful spouse, a bitter sibling. You’ve invested your sense of self and maybe your sense of worth in who you are as part of the family, and you’ve come up disappointed. Some of you are reading this book because your family is the animating figure of your life. You have not yet been hurt or disillusioned or disappointed. One day you will be. That is nothing to fear. It’s impossible for any of us to see the full spectrum of our lives, but sometimes, looking backwards, we can see little ways that God made himself known to us, always in his mysterious hiddenness, that felt at the time as if they were mere coincidence or randomness or fate. Much of these have to do with family. Maybe you are who you are because someone, in your family of origin or in the family of the church, poured themselves into you, loved you, believed in you. Maybe you are who you are because you survived those—in your family of origin or in the family of the church—who did just the opposite. Yet, you are here.

In our charged time, the family is often the subject of fiery public debate. We speak of those who “value” the family, or those who would “deconstruct” the family. And yet, as important as all those conversations are, the basic reality is that all of us, at some level, fear the family. We know that family can bring love, but also the risk of hurt. Those of us with strong families often fear that something could happen, and they could be gone. Those without healthy families often fear that they will never have a people to whom they can belong. And those who weathered awful families often fear that they won’t escape the damage done, or, even worse, that they will repeat it. We find ways to protect ourselves—either by grasping our families tightly, or by finding ways to run away from the duties of being family to one another. We put up protections by seeing ourselves only as the sum of our family relationships and responsibilities, or by trying to abandon those things. In either case, we are called to the place we don’t want to look—the cross.

C. S. Lewis, looking back over his life, summed all of it up as being “surprised by joy.” If we see “joy” only in the way the word is used most often around us, we might surmise that what Lewis meant by “joy” was what most people call “happiness” or “contentment.” For him, though, joy was a sense of longing, something bittersweet, having a sense of home but not really finding it. The awakening of joy is what led him, the long way around, to the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. In this, Lewis perceived pointers to the world beyond the one he could see. “When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter,” he wrote. “He who first sees it cries, ‘Look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare.”68 The Bible tells us that one of these “signposts” of the kingdom is the family—not just “the family” in abstract in the big, broad world but your family story, particularly, in the story of your life. If we ignore the signpost, we can easily find ourselves lost in the woods of the universe around us, pretending somehow that we do not need a Father, that we do not need a home. On the other hand, we can turn the signpost into an altar, looking to the family to be not just a blessing to us but a god. Whatever the case, we will be, at long last, disillusioned.

This disillusioning is not God’s judgment, but his mercy. We are all worshippers. “An idol is an object invested by your attention with the hope of transcendence,” one philosopher put it. “An idol is an object turned mirror.”69 At some point, we will be disenchanted with the idol’s false promises. “This moment when it looks like your worship has failed is the religious moment,” he writes. “This is the revelation.”70 The disappointment is the epiphany. It’s not just the one who prizes the family too much who idolizes it, but also the one who counts it as too little. Indeed, the latter often does so even more, spending a life focused on his family, in order to prove that he doesn’t need them, or that they don’t need him. When we come to the end of all that, though, however we get there, we can find freedom.

Family is not the gospel. If you think that family is the source of ultimate meaning in your life, then you will expect your family to make you happy, to live up to your expectations. You will then come to perceive that a dysfunctional family background or a spouse who leaves you or a child who walks away to a far country of rebellion has ruined your life. And, when you fail your family, as you inevitably will, you will spend your life trying to atone for your sins, and you will never find the peace you seek. But if you hold your family gently, you can find the freedom to see your family flourish. When you do not need to be your family’s Messiah, or they yours, then you can pour yourself out for those God has placed around you. In order to find freedom and joy, you must see that family is more important even than you think—so important that it is a place of spiritual warfare, a warfare that sometimes leaves us groaning in sighs too deep for words. No matter the brokenness, there can be joy. This requires, though, what Martin Luther called a theology of the cross, not a theology of glory. “The ‘theologian of glory’ calls the bad good and the good bad,” he confessed. “The ‘theologian of the cross’ says what a thing is.”71 We see this theology of glory in those who would say “the family” is itself a social construct, and that we can ignore or reconstruct it. We see it also, though, in those who, in defending the family, would idealize it to the point of denying how difficult it in fact is.

The cross-shaped life, though, frees us to neither idealize nor demonize the family. We do not resent our families as burdens to us when we see that, in the cross, burden is blessing. We do not expect our families to meet our every need or longing because we have an eternity of glory in front of us. This can only happen, though, in the kind of universe we find ourselves in: the sort of universe in which God has joined us in our humanity, has offered up his own Son in a sacrifice of both perfect justice and perfect mercy. If family is not the ultimate source of meaning, or ultimate wound of hurt; if my life is more than my family, then I have the freedom not to cling to the family or to repel them from me. As I follow Jesus in the way of the cross, I can see every day as an opportunity to lose my life—sometimes in the ordinary rhythms of hugging a grandmother, changing a diaper, walking in the park, or singing in a choir. Knowing that my life is already over, crucified at the cross, and my life is waiting to burst into action, ascended at the right hand of God, I can gladly lose my life for my family, knowing I need not protect myself from love. I can be free to serve, free to love.

* * * *

I started this book noting that the cross was a family crisis. There we see the hidden presence of a faithful Father, the visible presence of a human mother, the background of a life lived out with an infancy, a childhood, and a hometown. There we see a Groom fighting for his Bride. The thief on the cross, though, as far as we know, was all alone. One would not expect that family members, even if he had them, would show up for someone so reviled. They would probably, after all, have been ashamed of him. They wouldn’t have wanted to admit that their family was connected to someone who was both executed by the empire and cursed by God. And yet, he was not without family. “This day you will be in Paradise” is not just a promise of a solitary reunion between these two men. No, Paradise is not lonely but vibrant and alive and brimming with people. “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus told his disciples (John 14:2). With one word, he promised this wretched criminal that one of them would be his. In short, whatever this thief had heard from his own family, whatever he had said to his own family, Jesus’ words to him were words he had learned long ago on a riverbank: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased” (Mark 1:11).

Family is crucial, a signpost pointing away from us to the very meaning of the universe itself. Your family, whatever it is, will bless you, maybe in ways you don’t even notice in the blur of busyness at the moment. Stop and notice these blessings. Listen to what God is telling you through them. Precisely because of its crucial importance, family can scare us. Perhaps you are afraid. You may be afraid of failing your family. You may be afraid of losing your family. This, too, is grace. As he lay in a hospital bed near death, John Updike noted a telephone call from his minister, and wrote: “A clergyman—those comical purveyors of what makes sense to just the terrified.”72 The most important things only make sense to the terrified. But they also only make sense on the other side of that terror. We learned that at the Place of the Skull, where we could see both the horror of our sin before a holy God and the exuberant love with which he came looking for us, even to the cross itself and beyond. Your family might bring you pain. What of it? To love is to suffer. But you have learned that suffering is not a sign of God’s absence but his presence. You learned that at the Place of the Skull. You learned that when you first heard the words calling out to you, from somewhere on an ancient Galilean shore, “Take up your cross and follow me.” Do not be afraid. Your family will lead you where you never expected to go. But this is no reason for fear. The path before you is the way of the cross.

The way of the cross leads Home. The Light shines in the darkness, still, and the darkness has yet to overcome it. Whatever storms you may face now, you can survive. If you listen carefully enough, even in the scariest, most howling moments, you can hear a Galilean voice saying, “Peace. Be still.” If you give attention to more than just the wind and the waves, you might see some hands reaching out for you. In fact, you may notice that those hands already have you, holding you safely above the waters below. You are not as tossed about as you think you are. If you stop to recognize it, you just might notice that those hands holding onto you have spike-holes. Do not be afraid. The scars remain, but the storm has passed.