Families and Possessions

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 4th

(the image depicts Paul, Onesimus, and Philemon, from an anonymous medieval illustration, from Wikimedia; the image is in the public domain)

Notice, in Philemon 1-21 and Luke 14:25-33, how concerns about wealth and family are intertwined. Notice how easily talk about brothers and mothers and children and fathers slides into talk about ledgers and balances owed. Notice how Paul, writing to Philemon, takes a long and knowing glance into the thickets of obligation and debt: “If he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account…I will repay it. I say nothing about you owing me even your own self.” Feel the snare tightening in his words. Notice how Jesus, speaking of discipleship, insists that following him means abandoning possessions and family alike, as if they were two items on a list of contraband that won't be allowed through the door.  

Families are among the most difficult and rewarding parts of most of our lives. Families can exact incalculable pain and create inestimable damage. Families can give life and nurture wholeness. Sometimes they can do these things at the same time, or one after another, in alternating or overlapping patterns of heartache and joy. Some families look like one thing from the outside but be something else inside, spinning off secrets, unspoken truces, and grudges as they go. Families are never uncomplicated. They can only really be known to those who inhabit them, and even then only from one perspective.

What does Jesus know about families? I think it’s a fair question. When he says, in Luke 14:26 and elsewhere in the gospels, that we should be willing to give up our families to follow him, what does he know about the things he’s saying? The evidence is thin. We know Jesus’ mother, Mary, who is a presence throughout his life. We see glimpses of Joseph, his father, but only in Jesus’ infancy and childhood. By the time Jesus is grown, Joseph is unaccountably absent, likely dead, but perhaps otherwise removed from the scene. The gospels make references to brothers and sisters, who seem to have varying levels of closeness to Jesus. John the Baptist is said to be Jesus’ cousin. Beyond that, there isn’t a lot to go on. It would be difficult to sketch out a family tree or a genogram (though both Matthew and Luke try, in different ways, through their different genealogies), to place Jesus among his people, and trace the contours of a family life. When he tells us to leave our families behind, we don’t have a strong sense of what lies beneath his words.

When Paul writes to Philemon, he’s writing as an outsider who is intervening in a family, or at least a household. Scholars debate, now more than ever, what exactly is going on in this shortest of Paul’s letters. The traditional view is that Onesimus (“Useful,” in Greek, the kind of name that can speak volumes about someone’s place within a system) is enslaved by Philemon, and has run away to find Paul so that Paul can intervene on his behalf with the slaveholder. Another compelling view is that Onesimus and Philemon are estranged brothers (see verse 16), and Paul is attempting to reconcile them. It might even be possible that both are true—that somehow one brother has ended up enslaved to the other, either legally or metaphorically, and that Paul is attempting to disentangle them from each other. Whatever the case may be, Paul has inserted himself into the dispute, and he has arrived with words about kinship and indebtedness. In verse 10 he calls Onesimus “my child…whose father I have become during my imprisonment,” and we have already seen how much turns on the possibility of financial debt and repayment. Paul is throwing his authority around, leaning on Philemon to do the right thing, dropping thinly veiled threats and guilt trips to get his way, and deploying the language of family. We can marvel at Paul’s chutzpah, even as we wonder what ever became of this disagreement and what fate awaited Onesimus.

Many people have noticed that the two major figures of earliest Christianity, Jesus and Paul, both had unusual family lives, for their time and place. Most notably, neither seems to have been married. People disagree on how non-normative that might have been, or how their singleness might have factored into how people saw and understood them. I tend to think that we overstate the importance of their relationship statuses, especially when we use it as a springboard to big, dramatic conclusions (Jesus must have been secretly married to Mary Magdalene! Paul must have been gay! Perhaps those things were true, but singleness alone is not a very good argument for them). A more interesting question for me is how these two men’s family lives shaped how they thought about other people and institutions. In a society constructed with the building blocks of families, for better and for worse, how did Jesus and Paul’s understandings of family influence their thoughts and words?

Paul’s family of origin is almost entirely obscure, though scholars have tried to piece things together through inference and probability. We just don’t know a lot about his early life. (I, for one, would love to read some newly-uncovered copy of Paul’s Epistle To His Mom). But in the letter to Philemon, Paul is both upholding and undermining common understandings of family bonds. He’s working to reconcile Philemon and Onesimus, or at least cool the heat of their tensions. Maybe, if they are brothers, Paul is working to stitch a family back together. But he’s also messing with the family system at the same time. Philemon is clearly the head of household—the one who runs things, sitting atop the hierarchy. By showing up (in letter form) and demanding things of Philemon, Paul is messing with that. (Notice in verse 2 that Paul basically carbon-copies Apphia, Archippus, and the whole church that meets at their house, putting Philemon on blast and publicly undermining his authority). No matter what the backstory might be, Paul is doing some things to uphold the family, and other things to chip away at its structure. It’s a fascinating balancing act, and that’s why the letter to Philemon packs so much drama into a few short verses.

For years, I have had my students write the letter Philemon might have written back to Paul in response, imagining what kind of reaction the proud head of household might have had to Paul’s intervention. Students have written a dizzying variety of possible replies, from angry and vitriolic to mournful and contrite to prideful and defiant. Some imagine family drama behind the terse words of Paul’s letter, and bring it out in the response: illicit affairs, histories of neglect or abuse, or slights that have grown into family-defining feuds. In short, my students have imagined a full range of families for Philemon and Onesimus (and sometimes Paul too), and they have tried to imagine how those family histories might account for the conflict that Paul is trying to address, as obscured by time as it might be.

One thing we might notice from our own participation in families is that no one really comes out looking like a pure hero or a pure villain. Family systems push and pull people to act in all kinds of ways, some of which are intentional and many of which are not. We inherit from the past, behaviors and traumas and blessings alike, and we gift to the future, whether we intend to or not. This is not to excuse the actions of individuals; we are all responsible for ourselves. But families have a way of putting a fence around our possibilities, making it hard to move beyond where and how things have already been. We can hop the fences or break them down, but it’s not easy to do, and often we end up living in other people’s patterns and behaviors, despite our best intentions not to. From the perspective of the whole family system, even the worst villains become understandable (if still villainous) and the most beloved heroes still participate in the most difficult parts of life together.

How much did Jesus and Paul know about all of that? When Jesus said we had to hate our father and mother, our spouse and children, our siblings, and even ourselves, did he mean something specific by it, and did he draw from his own family histories of love or hatred or indifference? To some, Jesus’ words about forsaking family sound like a death sentence, and to others they sound like a jailbreak. Which was it for Jesus? And what did Paul know about brotherhood and fatherhood, when he used those words in his letter to Philemon? Did he speak from a well of experience, or did he skim the surface of a very shallow pool? When both Paul and Jesus mixed family and possessions in a jumble of obligations and promises, did they know what they were talking about?

I think those questions about Jesus’ and Paul’s family perspectives are important, but they aren’t the most important questions. Because each of us reads the bible from the perspective of our own experiences and contexts, our own family histories become a part of the story. When Paul puts the squeeze on Philemon, does that kind of coercion seem honorable or sinister? It depends, and it’s different for each of us. When Jesus speaks of abandoning our kin, does that sound exciting or terrifying? It matters who your kin are, and where you’ve been together. What happens when you read Jesus’ words, or when you read Paul’s letter to Philemon, and hear them dipping in and out of families to make claims about the past and the future? What do you feel in these passages? Do the bonds loosen or tighten? Does the call to discipleship (or “obedience,” as Paul puts it) feel like a summons to freedom or captivity?

Both Jesus and Paul return to the question of possessions—Jesus in Luke 14:33, and Paul in Philemon 18 and 19. It’s an interesting common theme, in these passages that are otherwise thinking about relationships. Maybe we are meant to think about relationships and families as (or alongside) possessions, as things meant to be carried with us, but also sometimes left behind or stored away for a while. Maybe we should think about families as Jesus seems to, as things that can aid us on our way or else hold us back, and move through and within them accordingly? I’m not sure. People have struggled for centuries with the meaning of Jesus’ families sayings, and Paul’s too, trying to make sense of what, exactly, we should do. But maybe the answer depends on what Jesus knew about families, and what Paul knew, and more importantly than that, maybe it depends on what we know about families. Maybe the answer is unique to each of us, a part of who we are, discerning and determining what we should carry and what we should leave behind.