I Stories, when they are very good, often teach us important truths about ourselves and our lives. One very old story that many readers have found to be good in this sense is the story of Oedipus the King. Written about 400 years before the birth of Jesus by the Greek writer, Sophocles, it takes place in the ancient city of Thebes. The King of Thebes had a very violent family background. His father had been murdered, and he himself had become a kidnapper, a rapist, and a murderer. But nevertheless, he was the King. His wife, the Queen of Thebes, had recently given birth to a baby boy. And, while the birth of a boy would ordinarily be very good news for a King, it was very bad news for the King of Thebes. He had been advised by a fortune teller that he was destined to be killed by the hand of his own son. And so when his wife, the Queen, gave birth to the son, the King, in vicious outrage and fear, does something terrible. He binds the feet of the infant tightly together and orders the Queen to murder him. But the Queen finds that she cannot kill the child herself, and so, following the King's example, she orders her servant to commit the murder for her. The servant also cannot bear to kill the child. But she is a servant. There is no one of lower status for her to delegate the dirtywork to. And so she creates a situation where the natural environment will 'do' the evil deed for her. She takes the baby to a mountain top and abandons him there to die from exposure. Of course, what the Queen's servant had done was also terrible, but, at least now there was a slim possibility that the infant might be saved by someone else. And, in fact, that is exactly what happened. A shepherd comes by and rescues the infant. And when he unbinds the baby's feet, he sees that they are very swollen from being so tightly bound. And so he names the baby “Oedipus,” which means “swollen feet.” He carries little Oedipus back with him to Corinth. But the shepherd cannot afford to care for a baby. And so, remembering that the King of Corinth had no children of his own, the shepherd brings the infant, Oedipus, to the royal palace. The King happily receives the baby and raises Oedipus as if he were his own son. Oedipus grows up into a young man, and one day on a visit to Corinth, he overhears a rumor that the King and Queen of Corinth are actually not Oedipus' biological parents, that he was, in effect, adopted. And so Oedipus rushes back to the palace, and confronts them with the rumor. The royal couple deny that the rumor is true. But Oedipus is not persuaded. He has lingering doubts, and so he visits a fortune teller to ask who his real
parents are. The fortune teller does not actually answer his question, but instead tells him that he is destined to murder his father with his own hands, and then to marry his mother. And so the advice Oedipus receives is not to return home. But, of course, “home” for Oedipus had always been Corinth. And so, concluding that the King and Queen of Corinth must indeed be his true parents, and horrified by the fortune teller's prediction, Oedipus runs away to another city to avoid harming his parents. And what city does he decide to run away to? Thebes, the city where he was actually born. Now growing up as he did, as the adopted son of royalty, Oedipus led a very privileged life. And he had developed a highly inflated sense of his own importance. He believed that he had far more rights than any ordinary mortal, and that this was just as it should be. And so, as he was travelling in his chariot on the road from Corinth to Thebes – which is a fairly narrow road – he quite naturally assumed that he, the son of a King, should always have right-of-way when other, less important, travellers came along from the other direction. Well, another traveller did come along on that narrow road. And this other traveller happened to also have a highly inflated sense of his own importance. And so he was also expecting everyone to yield the right-of-way to him. And so, these two self-important men begin to quarrel. What neither of them realized, of course, was that they were, in fact, father and son. And Oedipus, being the younger and stronger of the two, kills the older man, his biological father, the King of Thebes. Oedipus continues on his way to Thebes, where he discovers that the city is under the curse of a sorceress. And she will not free the city from the curse unless someone can guess the right answer to her riddle. Oedipus volunteers, correctly answers the riddle, and the kingdom of Thebes is freed from its curse. As his reward, Oedipus is given the hand of the now widowed Queen, and so becomes “Oedipus the King.” And, of course, neither the Queen nor her new husband, Oedipus, realize that they are in fact, mother and son. Thebes begins to suffer from a terrible plague, which leaves the farms unable to produce food and the women unable to bear children. And so King Oedipus sends his brother-inlaw to a fortune teller to find out what he should do. The answer comes back that the only way the plague will end is if the murderer of the previous king is found and punished. Upon hearing this, Oedipus vows that he will find the murderer and banish him from the kingdom. And to get moving on this project, Oedipus calls for the assistance of a very wise old prophet, who is also blind. And he asks the prophet to reveal to him who the murderer
of the previous king is. The prophet responds, “Believe me – you really don't want to know.” Frustrated by the old prophet, Oedipus threatens that unless he reveals the truth, he will soon be not only blind but dead. And so the prophet reveals that, in fact, it is he himself, Oedipus, who is the murderer, and also that the former king whom Oedipus murdered was in fact his biological father, and thus, his new wife, the Queen of Thebes, was actually his biological mother. Once, the truth of what he has done sinks in, Oedipus is unable to bear it. It is destroying him from within. The only resolution he can find is to accept for himself the cruel fate that he had promised to inflict on the murderer. He blinds himself, and accepts banishment from the Kingdom of Thebes forever. The story ends with blind Oedipus being led out into exile by his daughter, Antigone. II So what are some of the lessons that might be reflected on in this tragic story of family violence? Surely, it reveals how acts of violence can set into motion a terrible vicious cycle, one which harms not only the immediate victims and perpetrators, but the generations to come who are affected by their actions. Patterns of violent intending and deciding and acting can be woven right into a person's character and just keep repeating, over and over again, spreading the destructiveness and suffering of violence further and further. But the main thing that I would like us to notice in this story at the moment is how Oedipus, until he finds out that the man that he murdered was his own father, was quite fine with the fact that he had brutally murdered an old man on the road for refusing to yield the right-of-way to him. According to the story, Oedipus had no problems sleeping at night with respect to that incident. But the moment he discovers that the old man was his father, all hell breaks loose in his mind. Why? There is something very bizarre going on here in this story, something that is very easy for us to miss because we are all very conditioned to believe that harming people whom we really don't know, whom we don't consider to be “family,” is not quite as bad as harming our own people, our own flesh and blood. There is a very basic, gut-level human tendency to see others as either “family” or “not family.” Others don't always have to be our own flesh and blood to fit into the special category of “family.” We might form close bonds to them for any number of reasons. But when they do become “family” for us, we have a tendency to value them much more
highly that if they were “not family.” If they're family, we “have their back” in times of trouble. We feel that their honor is our honor. Their success is our success. But, there is another side to this tendency to value family above non-family: it is to feel that their dishonor is also our dishonor. Their shame is also our shame. Their failure is our failure. When someone whom we have placed on that very special pedestal called “family” falls off of it... that is when things can really get ugly. Because they have not just fallen off the pedestal themselves, they have knocked every single member of the family into the dirt with them. They have betrayed us all. The temptation in all of this is to think that we are somehow being virtuous when we act on this instinct to put certain people high up on a special pedestal called “family.” Because, actually, there is nothing virtuous about it. It is not a kind way to treat a person at all, because that sort of “specialness” actually has nothing to do with love. On the contrary, it is about giving a person certain special favors, based on their behaving in the ways that we want them to behave. And the moment they step out of line, the so-called love grows very cold. This approach to “family” is actually a sickness, which might more accurately be described as “family violence.” It is a symptom that something is terribly “off the mark” in the character of Oedipus when he can brutally murder a person without the slightest degree of remorse in one moment, and then be apparently overwhelmed with grief in the next moment, when he discovers that his victim was “family.” In the mind of Oedipus, that same victim goes from being a disposable thing in one moment, to a very precious thing, in the next. But, in truth, whether the victim is a disposable thing or a very precious thing, is not really that important, because either way, he remains a “thing,” and not a person. He has no dignity apart from his being granted the very special status of “family.” So if we were to run into someone like Oedipus on the road from Corinth to Thebes, it would, in one sense, be better for us if he considered us to be “family.” Then he would be less inclined to do anything to us that would be considered shameful, because the shame would be on his head as well. But even if he were to place us high up on his pedestal of family, it would still not be a safe place to be, for the moment we falter and fail to meet his expectations, he would no longer have a reason to refrain from violence of one form or another. What destroys Oedipus is his discovery in the very same moment that he is truly the son of a King – one whom would be placed by society on a very high pedestal; and also that he has murdered his father, the King – and so become one whom society would deem as fallen from grace, beyond all hope of redemption. In that bittersweet moment, we see all that is wrong with the world. In this way the story reveals that many human actions, carried out in the name of respectable institutions like “family,” are, in fact, little more than forms of violence.
III The Bible is no stranger to violence, including violence within families. Cain kills his brother Abel for being more highly esteemed than he is (Genesis 4:1-15). Abraham, in order to save his own neck, prostitutes his wife, Sarah, to the Egyptian Pharoah (Genesis 12:10-20). Lot offers his two daughters to an angry mob and tells them to do them whatever they like, as long as they don't bother his male house guests (Genesis 19:8). Amnon, the son of King David, rapes his sister, Tamar. And then, Absolom, David's other son, has Amnon murdered in revenge (2 Samuel 13:1-32). Just to name a few. In each of these violent stories, the victims had fallen, or been pushed, off of the family pedestal. They were no longer worthy of protection from harm in the minds of the perpetrators. And, of course, such violent dynamics within families are not just an ancient problem that no longer concerns us. All we have to do is read the newspaper or listen to the news to hear present day stories of violence against women by their spouses, against children by their parents, against parents by their children, against the elderly by the young. Still today, something is very “off” in our world's understanding and experience of what it means to be “family.” And there are even more subtle forms of family violence than the sorts which make it into the news. IV Jesus, in Mark's gospel, speaks to the issue of our “family values” and initiates a revolution in what it means to be family. In this particular reading (Mark 3:7-15, 19b35), Jesus had been raising quite a ruckus in Galilee. Crowds were swarming around him because his mere presence was causing people's demons to leave them. He had been curing many who were sick, and so other people with diseases were pushing through the crowds to get close to him. He appoints the 12 apostles to work with him, and then they go home for dinner. But the crowds would not let up. There was such a commotion that Jesus and his disciples could not even sit down to eat. The scribes, the religious teachers who had come down from Jerusalem, got very upset with all of these marginalized persons clamoring for the attention of Jesus, and all of these holy activities – healing the sick; freeing people from their demons – holy activities which the scribes were unable to do. When the religious authorities in a community don't like something that is happening... their followers quickly catch on, and often try to correct the situation. The people make sure that the offenders straighten up and fly right, so that the religious authorities will relax again, and no one will get in trouble. And, in this kind of situation, the believers in the community who get the most pressure applied to them are the family members of
whoever the trouble makers are. In this situation described in the gospel of Mark, Jesus is the one who is perceived as causing the trouble. And Jesus' family is there. His family is seeing the crowds and the commotion, and perceiving that the religious authorities are not happy with what is going on. And his family seems to know just how to respond. Now did someone approach Mary and the four brothers of Jesus and say something to them? I don't know. But I can imagine that in such a situation, some neighbor might have given Mary a little friendly advice, and said something like: “You know, Mary, you had really better get a handle on your boy over there; maybe send his brothers to shut him up & get rid of all those sick people, because he's gonna get us all in trouble, and I know you wouldn't want that to happen, now would you Mary?” We have probably all received that kind of “friendly” neighborly advice at one time or another. Or maybe no one said a word to Jesus' family. Maybe Mary and his brothers just knew that, as his family, it was their job to make sure that Jesus stepped back into line, and stop doing anything that would cause dishonor or trouble to them and their friends. But it is quite clear in the text that Jesus' family is operating on that gut-level instinct that pushes people into feeling that “What is 'right' is whatever helps the family & what is wrong is whatever harms the family.” If one of the family member's is screwing up, and risking the family's good name, you intervene. You get in there and you stop them from doing whatever it is that they are doing that people don't like. It's that gut-level instinct that says “If people don't like it, especially powerful people, then it's wrong, and you'd better not do it! Period. ” So, the Scripture tells us that when his family heard all of the commotion they went out to restrain him, because people were talking... People were saying “Jesus has gone out of his mind!” And important people, people who were wielded power in the community, including religious leaders, were shouting that Jesus is possessed by the devil. So, in such a situation, there is no question what the family's responsibility is: you go and restrain him, shut him up, get him to fall in line with whatever it is that the authorities want. And everything will be fine. Because if you don't, you're entire family – and even friends of the family – could be kicked out of the synagogue, shunned, unable to make a living, assaulted, and so on. Jesus' family is just doing what comes naturally. It's what people do when they're pushed and pulled from without by social pressures, and from within by their instincts to survive no matter what. It's what Oedipus and his family did. It's what Cain and Abraham and Lot and Amnon and Absolom did. It's what people do today in our society, even people within the Church.
But Jesus doesn't play by those rules. His disciples say to him, “Jesus, your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.” And Jesus knew why they were there, that they were being used as pawns. He knew how these knee-jerk reactions worked, and how the authorities used them to clamp down on things that they didn't want to happen. But Jesus did not care what the authorities wanted or did not want, if it was different than what God wanted. He was answering to a Higher Power. And God was telling him to heal the sick and to liberate people from their demons. So that's what he was doing. And he knew that it was precisely his obedience to God's will that was rocking the boat of this very rigid society, where everyone had to do what the authorities expected, or else.... Through subtle, and not so subtle, intimidation, the authorities had everyone walking on egg-shells. This is how people who live in conditions of violence feel all of the time. So what does Jesus do in this precarious situation? Does he panic, and say: “Oh no, guys, my mom and my brothers are here! You know what that means! We're in trouble! We'd better stop listening to the Holy Spirit! I know I just chose you all to be my apostles and everything, but... we've really got to face reality here. If we don't fall in line with what these scribes think we should be doing, all of us, and our families and our friends could be disgraced. We could be shunned. It could even lead to violence. It's really too bad, I know, because it would have been so nice to follow God's will, but that's just the way the world works.” No! Jesus doesn't say that! Instead, he poses a very interesting question to make his disciples think about what this whole thing we call “family” is really all about. He says: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And he looks around the room, and looking each one of his disciples in the eye, he says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” This is revolutionary. Jesus is shaking the foundations of the ancient Mediterranean world, and our world as well. He is saying that family is not about honor and shame. Family is not about staying on a pedestal in the eyes of men, and making sure that you never get knocked off. Family is not about flesh and blood. Family is about pleasing God. For Jesus, all violence is family violence, because all persons were created to be the children of God. All violence is a symptom of a distorted vision of what it means to be family. The Christians are not superior to the Jews. The Jews have no more human dignity than the Samaritans. The scribes and the Pharisees deserve no more kindness than the prostitutes and the tax collectors. The judges and government officials have no greater value than the lepers and the homosexuals and the unmarried and widowed women. Jesus knew very well that there are certain persons who would never be valued and cared for by this world, because the way of the world is precisely to cast its most vulnerable members out beyond the limits of respectability, and to keep them down
there, so that other, more powerful members can be elevated, high up on their pedestals, where they can pretend to be more special, more worthy of esteem than ordinary men and women. That's the price that has to be paid. For some to be seen as more honorable than all the rest, some others must be made to be seen as more shameful, more unworthy than all the rest. And so the most vulnerable become the scapegoats for the most powerful. This is the way of the world. This is the principle that drives tragic stories like Oedipus the King, and the Bible's own accounts of family violence. But Jesus does not operate according to this principle. And that is why there is a such a dramatic commotion in today's Gospel text. The most vulnerable, the outcasts, we're being raised up to a place of dignity, being received as beloved children of God. For Jesus, there is a place at the table for all of God's children. Because Jesus operates according to a different principle. A principle that is actually a Person, the Person of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit ushers everyone into the banquet, everyone who wants to be a conscious active member of the family..... everyone who is open to being helped to do God's will.... is welcome. And those who are not open, those who want nothing to do with the will of God, are not made outcasts. Instead, the love of God in Jesus continues inviting them to become open. But the Spirit never forces anyone into, or out of, this family. Because the Spirit is not violent. V Why would anyone not want to be part of this new way of being family that Jesus is instituting? Well one reason might be that this new spiritual way of being family doesn't involve getting put up on a special pedestal, so that we can look down on others. It is true that in this family, we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ" (Romans 8:16-17.) And that does entitle us to all the glorious pleasures of God's kingdom. But it also entitles us to all of the pains of belonging to God's kingdom in this world. The children of God are enabled by grace, through community, to bear the pains of grief and contrition, the pains of being rejected and persecuted by those who prefer the violent way the world operates and do not want it to change. Being a child of God entitles us to everything that we see manifest in the life of Jesus, and that includes both his glory and his Cross. Perhaps that is why many, and we ourselves, often hesitate to claim his glory.... because we want to avoid the pain. But only through sharing in his sufferings do we also share in his glory. In this way, membership in the family of Jesus calls us into a radical revolution of our characters. A way of life which purifies our understandings and intentions and decisions, and frees us from the violent, destructive patterns that dominate so much of
our world. A way of life which grounds our views of right and wrong not simply on whatever way the winds of popular opinion may happen to be blowing, but on a pure heart, a virtuous heart, the heart of Jesus. It is not an easy message that Jesus gave his disciples about the real meaning of family. It surely left them reflecting on these issues for quite some time. Were they ready to be this kind of “family� where the only thing that matters is that God's will is being done? Are we ready to be this kind of family? One thing we can be certain of. If we open ourselves to the possibility of being family in this new way, God in Christ through the Holy Spirit will surely help us become ready.
Rishi Sativihari