Monday • 3/21/2022
Monday of 3 Lent, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 80; Genesis 44:18–34; 1 Corinthians 7:25–31; Mark 5:21–43

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Today’s readings offer an intriguing juxtaposition of passages about familial love. In Genesis 44, Jacob’s “life is bound up in the boy’s life,” so much so that if something were to happen to Benjamin (Jacob’s youngest son), Simeon claims, it would kill their father (Genesis 44:30–31). In Mark 5, Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, is so anxious about his daughter’s health, he seeks out Jesus, throws himself at his feet, and repeatedly begs Jesus to come and help her. 

Familial love is powerful and good. The 5th Commandment concerns the parent-child bond, the 7th Commandment concerns marital faithfulness, and the 10th commandment assures that marital faithfulness is as much about heart as about body. God blesses the parental and marital ties that bind. Paul lists “lack of natural (i.e., familial) affection” (astorgos) as one characteristic of universal sin and a special sign of end-times wickedness (Romans 1:31 2 Timothy 3:3). 

At the same time, Jesus challenges any claim that familial ties are more important than love for him: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” and “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Matthew 10:37; 19:12c; Luke 14:26–27). 

Paul echoes Jesus when, in 1 Corinthians, he urges Corinthians not to put aspirations for marriage and family life ahead of priorities about life with God. There are important questions about, say, whether or not to get married (and take on all the attendant responsibilities), or whether to remarry if you’ve been divorced or widowed. But Paul wants to make sure we put family-life questions in their place. As pointers to, and supports for, God’s love, those relationships are precious. As substitutes for, and blocks against, God’s love, those relationships are sinful. Family life is penultimate. Life with God is ultimate. 

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis presents a parable about an imaginary bus trip some inhabitants from hell make to the outskirts of paradise:

A female ghost (whose name we never learn) is furious that Heaven will not give to her Robert, the husband she had sent to an early grave through her obsessive pushiness. On earth, Robert had been no more than a project for her and a means to her social ambitions. And she cannot imagine an afterlife in which he could be happy apart from her efforts to improve him: “Please, please! I’m so miserable. I must have someone to—to do things to.” Like “a dying candle flame,” she simply snaps, disappearing into a nothingness as empty as her earthly existence. 

In another scene, one of Heaven’s hosts informs Pam, the overbearing and controlling mother of Michael, that she is trapped in the hell of “your merely instinctive love for your child (tigresses share that, you know!).” God, continues Heaven’s host, wanted to turn that tigress-love “into something better. He wanted you to love Michael as He understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.” 

Pam cannot understand that without love of God, a mother’s love can be “uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac.” It can become evil, a fact that cannot be hidden under the veil of a claim that “Mother-love” is “the highest and holiest feeling in human nature.” For, Lewis explains, “no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” 

In Christ, you see, all relationships are redeemable. Without him, all are subject to demonic possession. In Lent, may we renounce all idolatries, including ones that are relational. May we embrace lives of surrender — surrender of ourselves to our Sovereign and Lord, and surrender of our loved ones to His care and oversight. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Adaptation, Pixabay

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, chapters 10 and 11.