The Gospels don't preach family values (Lauren Winner)

This is not to say that Jesus was anti-family. Many of his teachings offer blunt rebuke to a casual treatment of family bonds: He insisted that, except in the direst circumstances, marriage ought not end in divorce. "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder" is a direct quote. And, in a culture that viewed children as possessing little value and fewer rights, Jesus was exquisitely devoted to children, saying that adults have to become like them if they want to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But Jesus supported the family only after redefining it. He didn't care whose child or parent you were; he cared that you were his followers' brother or sister in Christ. We can see this most clearly and most startlingly in Jesus' interactions his own mother, Mary. When I look at the crèche scenes scattered all over my house, I'm tempted to remember Mary only as Jesus' mom. She was that, of course, and the Virgin birth is no small thing. (Click here for more on Jesus' birth.) But in the Gospel of Mark, we see that Mary is Jesus' disciple before she is his mother. Jesus is out and about, teaching in parables. People gather around him, but they don't know what to think—some say he's crazy; others think he might be possessed by an evil spirit. Mary and Jesus' brothers come to see him, perhaps to protect and take care of him. When some of his disciples tell Jesus that his family is outside looking for him, he responds, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" Then, looking at his followers, Jesus declares, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

Mary, of course, makes the cut—in the Christian tradition, she is held up as a woman who, by submitting to Jesus' miraculous conception, supremely did God's will. But in the new kingdom that Jesus inaugurates, Mary's relationship with Jesus is defined by her membership in the community that becomes his church. Jesus makes the point again at the very end of his life. On the cross, he points to a disciple and then says to Mary, "Dear woman, here is your son," and to the disciple says, "Here is your mother."

This understanding of family is at the root of the ritual of baptism. Addressing his readers as his children and his brothers, Paul suggests that the essence of baptism is an adoption into a new family, in which the waters of baptism run thicker than blood ties. As the contemporary ethicist Julie Hanlon Rubio has argued in A Christian Theology of Marriage and Family, Jesus called his followers to create a society in which people shared their property and didn't lord power over each other—a great early experiment in collectivism. "A radical rejection of the traditional family was necessary," Rubio writes, to create a community of believers who put following Jesus above all else.

radical stuff... once again redefining what we know to be true.