In a 2012 opinion essay in the New York Times, Stephanie Coontz, then one of the foremost researchers on the family in contemporary society, observed the irony of American politicians citing the Christian faith as a defender of “family values.” “In fact,” she wrote, “a radical antifamily ideology permeates Christ’s teaching, and the early Christian tradition often set faith and family against each other.”1 To make the case, Coontz cited how Jesus calls his disciples to leave their families. She also noted Paul’s own preference for people to remain unmarried.2 Coontz is not alone in such observations. Biblical scholars often encounter descriptions of Jesus “relativizing” or “destabilizing” ancient expectations around family. One of the strongest statements about how the teachings of Jesus challenge natural family relationships was offered by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who saw with clarity the fundamental reorientation of identity and loyalty that Jesus requires of his followers. Kierkegaard wrote:
To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is such a radical change that, humanly speaking, one must say that it is the heaviest trial to a family that one of its members becomes a Christian. For in such a Christian the God-relationship becomes so predominant that he is not “lost” in the ordinary sense of the word; no, in a far deeper sense than dying, he is lost to everything that is called family.3
With testimonies such as these, we might wonder how Jesus and his followers ever came to be presented as champions of the family!
In fact, the New Testament consistently portrays family as both a potential stumbling block to faith and a promising setting for lives that are faithful to the gospel. The teachings of Jesus challenge conventional assumptions about family and simultaneously lay the groundwork for a new concept of family marked by discipleship. In this article, we’ll consider how these challenges and revisions are present in our earliest record of Jesus’ life and ministry, the Gospel according to Mark.
Jesus’ Family:
Whoever Does the Will of God
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke both portray Jesus as the child of parents who were remarkably faithful. In contrast, the Gospel of Mark omits this backstory. Jesus enters the narrative unattached—defined entirely by his relation to God (1:1, 11) and his mission of announcing God’s kingdom (1:14–15). The first appearance of Jesus’ biological family occurs in Mark 3:20–21. Jesus is attracting crowds, and his family appears on the scene trying “to seize him” because “they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” In Greek, it is unclear if it is Jesus’ family who holds the opinion that he is crazy or if Jesus’ family has simply heard the slander about Jesus that is circulating among others. Either way, the family of Jesus appears on the scene first with the aim of curtailing his mission. This is not a promising introduction to Jesus’ family.
What follows in Mark 3 is a teaching that can only be taken as a warning: Scribes from Jerusalem come with a different slander. They are not saying that Jesus is crazy; instead, they claim he is demon possessed (v. 22). With this willful misinterpretation of Jesus’ ministry, the scribes are dangerously close to blaspheming the Spirit of God (vv. 28–30). Now Jesus’ family returns. Like a good playwright, Mark positions all the characters with care. We can see the scene with our mind’s eye: Jesus is inside a house. He is seated, teaching women and men, who form a circle around him. Someone enters with a report: “Teacher, your mother and brothers are outside seeking you” (3:32). Of course, all would expect Jesus to receive his kin, to go to them or let them in. But Jesus does not break the circle. Instead, he asks a question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” Then he looks around him at those in the circle and makes an astonishing declaration: “Behold, my mother and brothers! For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (v. 35). In the space of a few sentences, Mark shows Jesus radically redefining family around the will of God. Jesus’ biological family (mother and brothers) and his religious family (the scribes) are not only physically outside and separated from him, they are relationally outside as well. The way “in” is through commitment to the message of the gospel—the kingdom of God that has come near and that Jesus and his followers proclaim and enact.4
Further, Jesus’ family is no help to his reputation when he travels to Nazareth in Mark 6. There, in his hometown, the crowds take offense at Jesus, essentially saying, “We know this man’s family. How could the son of the carpenter, of Mary . . . how could the brother of James, Joses, Judas, Simon, and his sisters . . . how could someone from this family proclaim this message?” Jesus makes no effort to recover family ties. Instead, he sees family alienation as a corollary to his calling: “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, among his kin, and in his home” (6:4). Later in the Gospel, when the women who followed Jesus observe his crucifixion from afar, we read that “Mary, the mother of James the younger and Joses,” belonged to this group (15:40, 47; 16:1). All signs point to this being Mary, the mother of Jesus (6:3). But Mark does not designate her as Jesus’ mother. Mark does not admit Mary any special claim on her son.5 In Mark’s worldview, the position of Jesus’ mother belongs to one who does the will of God (3:35).
Loyalty to Jesus
and the Division of Families
Mark’s ambivalence about family exists in other elements of the Gospel, too. James and John respond to the call to discipleship by leaving their father Zebedee in the boat with hired hands (1:20). Peter looks back at the high cost of the decision that he and the other disciples have made: “Look,” he says to Jesus, “we have left everything to follow you” (10:18). Surely this “everything” includes family because Jesus’ subsequent teaching focuses on the cost of discipleship in relation to the household: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children[!] or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (10:29–30).
Discipleship has the power both to dissolve natural family ties and to reestablish them through the bond of the kingdom. In fact, the whole of Mark 10 has been interpreted as a “household code” for followers of Jesus: first addressing marriage (10:1–12), then children (they are model disciples; vv. 13–16), the possessions of the household and its boundaries (vv. 17–31), and finally the role of slaves (the most prominent members of Jesus’ family are called to be servants; vv.32–45).6 The hierarchy of the ancient family is radically upended in the family of Jesus, in which humble service is the criterion for the exercise of authority.7
When we take these points together, we see that Mark recognizes the enormous, painful cost that the kingdom of God can introduce into a family. Pledging allegiance to Jesus and his message entails renouncing all other claims to identity and loyalty. The reorientation of a life around Jesus can dissolve the relationships within a biological family. Jesus recognizes this cost in the searing prediction he makes about the troubles his disciples will experience: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise up against their parents and will put them to death” (13:12).
Jesus’ Father
and the Family of Believers
In the ancient world, the figure of the father traditionally defined the family and the household. It is not a coincidence then that the familial language which Mark is most comfortable using is “Son” and that, in Mark, the “Father” is God in heaven. It is Israel’s God, Jesus’ Father, who claims Jesus as his “son” both at his baptism and on the mountain of the transfiguration (1:11; 9:6; cf. 1:1). Jesus pours out his lament before God in Gethsemane, addressing his “Abba, Father” (14:36). When Jesus dies, the centurion rightly exclaims, “Truly this man was God’s son” (15:39). The new family that sits in a circle around Jesus contains mothers, sisters, and brothers, but no human father. Those who have left houses, families (including fathers), and fields receive back all of those things, except they do not receive back fathers (10:29–30). For disciples, the Father is always God in heaven.
Jesus is the son and the brother of those who have come to entrust themselves to him and follow after him. This is the family that Jesus establishes. It is a family defined not by blood or marriage but by faith and discipleship. It includes tax collectors and sinners, men and women, fishermen, a zealot, and no small number of ordinary folk—some related by blood, but not most. The relationship that creates and defines this family is their belonging to the same Father and their commitment and obedience to the Father’s will (3:35; 14:36).
The Natural Family
and the Kingdom of God
The points above trace the enormous pressure that loyalty to Jesus and the kingdom puts on traditional family relationships. This loyalty undercuts the presupposition of family hierarchy and stability that would have been assumed within ancient Jewish society—as they still are in many societies. In the tension between honoring father and mother and following Jesus, Jesus wins every time. Yet this survey of family in Mark would be incomplete if it did not mention the Gospel narrative’s consistent positive engagement with family relationships. A remarkable number of interactions show Jesus engaging with the realities of family life without engendering conflict.
As we’ve noted, James and John leave their father in the boat (1:20), but the Gospel does not highlight their ongoing estrangement from their family. Simon and Andrew respond to Jesus’ call in 1:16, but, before long, we see Jesus in Simon’s house, healing his mother-in-law (1:29–31). Instead of dividing Simon’s natural family, faith in Jesus and the kingdom he announces seems to have begun to define it. In Mark 5, a man is healed from a brutal demonic possession that caused him to live in isolation among tombs. After he is healed, the man begs to join Jesus on his mission. Instead, Jesus gives him a different vocation: “Go to your home, to your people, and report all that the Lord has done for you and how he has shown you mercy” (5:19). It should not be lost on us that, in this family that had been torn apart by a demon, the requirement of discipleship for this man was not an enthusiastic adventure with Jesus in a distant land but a return to home and a command to herald the mercy of the Lord in that home and among neighbors.
Families offer the context for some of our most significant visions of the kingdom’s power and lessons about what it means to entrust oneself to Jesus. Jairus is called to faith, even in the shadow of death, as he pleads with Jesus for the life of his daughter (5:21–43). The Syrophoenician woman is a mother acting alone; she too pleads for the healing of her daughter, and her interaction with Jesus calls forth a daring faith that Jesus affirms (7:24–30). Another desperate father intercedes with Jesus for his boy who is possessed and often throws himself into a fire (9:14–29). In these scenes, parents experiencing desperate fear and heartbreak for their children are summoned to faith and prayer.
In Mark 7, some Pharisees criticize Jesus for being lax in his commitment to purity. Jesus returns a scathing indictment: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your ‘tradition’!” His case-in-point is a Pharisaic practice that allows a man to take money that should be used to support aging parents and to devote it instead to God. (Imagine tithing your savings rather than supporting your aging parents!) The tradition makes a person choose between honoring parents and devotion to God. Jesus sees the financial support of dependent parents as implicit in the command to “honor your father and mother” (7:1–13). A few chapters later, in Mark 10:1–12, Pharisees ask Jesus if he permits divorce. Again, on the basis of the Old Testament—“the two shall become one flesh”—Jesus affirms the marital relationship, that is, the relationship that is central to family. In 10:17, the rich man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, and among the commandments that lead to life is, again, the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and mother.” If this is an antifamily ideology, it is surely a strange one!
Instead of being “for” or “against” family, our survey of Mark offers a complex picture of how Jesus and his message of the kingdom relate to the topic of family. As pastors, therapists, teachers, leaders, and, of course, people who live in some kind of “family,” we should consider three threads that run through Mark’s portrayal:
In the end, Kierkegaard was correct: discipleship to Jesus puts an enormous strain on the natural family. In many times and places, disciples have lost one family and have experienced the hundredfold blessing of the family of God. For those who are still embedded in a natural family, however, discipleship is not the end of the matter. The family is the site where believers live out their faith and their service. It is where they are challenged most sincerely to let Christ mediate all of their relationships. It is where they earnestly seek forgiveness. It is where they suffer their deepest griefs, and it funds their most heartfelt prayers.
Chris Blumhofer is associate professor of New Testament. He completed his PhD at Duke University in 2017, focusing his research on the significance of John’s engagement with the Old Testament and Jewish traditions. Outside of his work on John, Dr. Blumhofer’s interests include theological interpretation of Scripture, the Synoptic Gospels, and the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. Dr. Blumhofer is the recipient of several scholarships and grants, and has presented at various conferences on topics related to the New Testament. He coauthored, with Richard Hays, the chapter “The Canonical Matrix of the Gospels” in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels. He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and ordained as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
In a 2012 opinion essay in the New York Times, Stephanie Coontz, then one of the foremost researchers on the family in contemporary society, observed the irony of American politicians citing the Christian faith as a defender of “family values.” “In fact,” she wrote, “a radical antifamily ideology permeates Christ’s teaching, and the early Christian tradition often set faith and family against each other.”1 To make the case, Coontz cited how Jesus calls his disciples to leave their families. She also noted Paul’s own preference for people to remain unmarried.2 Coontz is not alone in such observations. Biblical scholars often encounter descriptions of Jesus “relativizing” or “destabilizing” ancient expectations around family. One of the strongest statements about how the teachings of Jesus challenge natural family relationships was offered by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who saw with clarity the fundamental reorientation of identity and loyalty that Jesus requires of his followers. Kierkegaard wrote:
To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is such a radical change that, humanly speaking, one must say that it is the heaviest trial to a family that one of its members becomes a Christian. For in such a Christian the God-relationship becomes so predominant that he is not “lost” in the ordinary sense of the word; no, in a far deeper sense than dying, he is lost to everything that is called family.3
With testimonies such as these, we might wonder how Jesus and his followers ever came to be presented as champions of the family!
In fact, the New Testament consistently portrays family as both a potential stumbling block to faith and a promising setting for lives that are faithful to the gospel. The teachings of Jesus challenge conventional assumptions about family and simultaneously lay the groundwork for a new concept of family marked by discipleship. In this article, we’ll consider how these challenges and revisions are present in our earliest record of Jesus’ life and ministry, the Gospel according to Mark.
Jesus’ Family:
Whoever Does the Will of God
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke both portray Jesus as the child of parents who were remarkably faithful. In contrast, the Gospel of Mark omits this backstory. Jesus enters the narrative unattached—defined entirely by his relation to God (1:1, 11) and his mission of announcing God’s kingdom (1:14–15). The first appearance of Jesus’ biological family occurs in Mark 3:20–21. Jesus is attracting crowds, and his family appears on the scene trying “to seize him” because “they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” In Greek, it is unclear if it is Jesus’ family who holds the opinion that he is crazy or if Jesus’ family has simply heard the slander about Jesus that is circulating among others. Either way, the family of Jesus appears on the scene first with the aim of curtailing his mission. This is not a promising introduction to Jesus’ family.
What follows in Mark 3 is a teaching that can only be taken as a warning: Scribes from Jerusalem come with a different slander. They are not saying that Jesus is crazy; instead, they claim he is demon possessed (v. 22). With this willful misinterpretation of Jesus’ ministry, the scribes are dangerously close to blaspheming the Spirit of God (vv. 28–30). Now Jesus’ family returns. Like a good playwright, Mark positions all the characters with care. We can see the scene with our mind’s eye: Jesus is inside a house. He is seated, teaching women and men, who form a circle around him. Someone enters with a report: “Teacher, your mother and brothers are outside seeking you” (3:32). Of course, all would expect Jesus to receive his kin, to go to them or let them in. But Jesus does not break the circle. Instead, he asks a question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” Then he looks around him at those in the circle and makes an astonishing declaration: “Behold, my mother and brothers! For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (v. 35). In the space of a few sentences, Mark shows Jesus radically redefining family around the will of God. Jesus’ biological family (mother and brothers) and his religious family (the scribes) are not only physically outside and separated from him, they are relationally outside as well. The way “in” is through commitment to the message of the gospel—the kingdom of God that has come near and that Jesus and his followers proclaim and enact.4
Further, Jesus’ family is no help to his reputation when he travels to Nazareth in Mark 6. There, in his hometown, the crowds take offense at Jesus, essentially saying, “We know this man’s family. How could the son of the carpenter, of Mary . . . how could the brother of James, Joses, Judas, Simon, and his sisters . . . how could someone from this family proclaim this message?” Jesus makes no effort to recover family ties. Instead, he sees family alienation as a corollary to his calling: “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, among his kin, and in his home” (6:4). Later in the Gospel, when the women who followed Jesus observe his crucifixion from afar, we read that “Mary, the mother of James the younger and Joses,” belonged to this group (15:40, 47; 16:1). All signs point to this being Mary, the mother of Jesus (6:3). But Mark does not designate her as Jesus’ mother. Mark does not admit Mary any special claim on her son.5 In Mark’s worldview, the position of Jesus’ mother belongs to one who does the will of God (3:35).
Loyalty to Jesus
and the Division of Families
Mark’s ambivalence about family exists in other elements of the Gospel, too. James and John respond to the call to discipleship by leaving their father Zebedee in the boat with hired hands (1:20). Peter looks back at the high cost of the decision that he and the other disciples have made: “Look,” he says to Jesus, “we have left everything to follow you” (10:18). Surely this “everything” includes family because Jesus’ subsequent teaching focuses on the cost of discipleship in relation to the household: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children[!] or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (10:29–30).
Discipleship has the power both to dissolve natural family ties and to reestablish them through the bond of the kingdom. In fact, the whole of Mark 10 has been interpreted as a “household code” for followers of Jesus: first addressing marriage (10:1–12), then children (they are model disciples; vv. 13–16), the possessions of the household and its boundaries (vv. 17–31), and finally the role of slaves (the most prominent members of Jesus’ family are called to be servants; vv.32–45).6 The hierarchy of the ancient family is radically upended in the family of Jesus, in which humble service is the criterion for the exercise of authority.7
When we take these points together, we see that Mark recognizes the enormous, painful cost that the kingdom of God can introduce into a family. Pledging allegiance to Jesus and his message entails renouncing all other claims to identity and loyalty. The reorientation of a life around Jesus can dissolve the relationships within a biological family. Jesus recognizes this cost in the searing prediction he makes about the troubles his disciples will experience: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise up against their parents and will put them to death” (13:12).
Jesus’ Father
and the Family of Believers
In the ancient world, the figure of the father traditionally defined the family and the household. It is not a coincidence then that the familial language which Mark is most comfortable using is “Son” and that, in Mark, the “Father” is God in heaven. It is Israel’s God, Jesus’ Father, who claims Jesus as his “son” both at his baptism and on the mountain of the transfiguration (1:11; 9:6; cf. 1:1). Jesus pours out his lament before God in Gethsemane, addressing his “Abba, Father” (14:36). When Jesus dies, the centurion rightly exclaims, “Truly this man was God’s son” (15:39). The new family that sits in a circle around Jesus contains mothers, sisters, and brothers, but no human father. Those who have left houses, families (including fathers), and fields receive back all of those things, except they do not receive back fathers (10:29–30). For disciples, the Father is always God in heaven.
Jesus is the son and the brother of those who have come to entrust themselves to him and follow after him. This is the family that Jesus establishes. It is a family defined not by blood or marriage but by faith and discipleship. It includes tax collectors and sinners, men and women, fishermen, a zealot, and no small number of ordinary folk—some related by blood, but not most. The relationship that creates and defines this family is their belonging to the same Father and their commitment and obedience to the Father’s will (3:35; 14:36).
The Natural Family
and the Kingdom of God
The points above trace the enormous pressure that loyalty to Jesus and the kingdom puts on traditional family relationships. This loyalty undercuts the presupposition of family hierarchy and stability that would have been assumed within ancient Jewish society—as they still are in many societies. In the tension between honoring father and mother and following Jesus, Jesus wins every time. Yet this survey of family in Mark would be incomplete if it did not mention the Gospel narrative’s consistent positive engagement with family relationships. A remarkable number of interactions show Jesus engaging with the realities of family life without engendering conflict.
As we’ve noted, James and John leave their father in the boat (1:20), but the Gospel does not highlight their ongoing estrangement from their family. Simon and Andrew respond to Jesus’ call in 1:16, but, before long, we see Jesus in Simon’s house, healing his mother-in-law (1:29–31). Instead of dividing Simon’s natural family, faith in Jesus and the kingdom he announces seems to have begun to define it. In Mark 5, a man is healed from a brutal demonic possession that caused him to live in isolation among tombs. After he is healed, the man begs to join Jesus on his mission. Instead, Jesus gives him a different vocation: “Go to your home, to your people, and report all that the Lord has done for you and how he has shown you mercy” (5:19). It should not be lost on us that, in this family that had been torn apart by a demon, the requirement of discipleship for this man was not an enthusiastic adventure with Jesus in a distant land but a return to home and a command to herald the mercy of the Lord in that home and among neighbors.
Families offer the context for some of our most significant visions of the kingdom’s power and lessons about what it means to entrust oneself to Jesus. Jairus is called to faith, even in the shadow of death, as he pleads with Jesus for the life of his daughter (5:21–43). The Syrophoenician woman is a mother acting alone; she too pleads for the healing of her daughter, and her interaction with Jesus calls forth a daring faith that Jesus affirms (7:24–30). Another desperate father intercedes with Jesus for his boy who is possessed and often throws himself into a fire (9:14–29). In these scenes, parents experiencing desperate fear and heartbreak for their children are summoned to faith and prayer.
In Mark 7, some Pharisees criticize Jesus for being lax in his commitment to purity. Jesus returns a scathing indictment: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your ‘tradition’!” His case-in-point is a Pharisaic practice that allows a man to take money that should be used to support aging parents and to devote it instead to God. (Imagine tithing your savings rather than supporting your aging parents!) The tradition makes a person choose between honoring parents and devotion to God. Jesus sees the financial support of dependent parents as implicit in the command to “honor your father and mother” (7:1–13). A few chapters later, in Mark 10:1–12, Pharisees ask Jesus if he permits divorce. Again, on the basis of the Old Testament—“the two shall become one flesh”—Jesus affirms the marital relationship, that is, the relationship that is central to family. In 10:17, the rich man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, and among the commandments that lead to life is, again, the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and mother.” If this is an antifamily ideology, it is surely a strange one!
Instead of being “for” or “against” family, our survey of Mark offers a complex picture of how Jesus and his message of the kingdom relate to the topic of family. As pastors, therapists, teachers, leaders, and, of course, people who live in some kind of “family,” we should consider three threads that run through Mark’s portrayal:
In the end, Kierkegaard was correct: discipleship to Jesus puts an enormous strain on the natural family. In many times and places, disciples have lost one family and have experienced the hundredfold blessing of the family of God. For those who are still embedded in a natural family, however, discipleship is not the end of the matter. The family is the site where believers live out their faith and their service. It is where they are challenged most sincerely to let Christ mediate all of their relationships. It is where they earnestly seek forgiveness. It is where they suffer their deepest griefs, and it funds their most heartfelt prayers.
Chris Blumhofer is associate professor of New Testament. He completed his PhD at Duke University in 2017, focusing his research on the significance of John’s engagement with the Old Testament and Jewish traditions. Outside of his work on John, Dr. Blumhofer’s interests include theological interpretation of Scripture, the Synoptic Gospels, and the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. Dr. Blumhofer is the recipient of several scholarships and grants, and has presented at various conferences on topics related to the New Testament. He coauthored, with Richard Hays, the chapter “The Canonical Matrix of the Gospels” in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels. He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and ordained as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Cameron Lee, professor of marriage and family studies, writes about the effects of pastors’ stress on their children and about developing healthy practices for the good of the family.
