Canter Bridge

We believe that faith unites a family. Sometimes it does, though more seldom than we imagine.

Aging Eli felt a deep foreboding when reports of his sons’ comportment as self-serving priests reached his dulling ears. He pleads with them to change their ways, but does not offer understanding on the basis of ‘family’. The language is of covenantal repercussions, of cutting off and being cut off. In a short time Eli’s sons would be dead. Their stolen meat would do them no good then and Eli would be forbidden the unrestrained grief a father feels over righteous sons.

Family solidarity did no good there.

Jesus was blunt in his estimation of how families would be affected by his call to follow him:

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

Some families will know the good fortune of blood ties robust and flexible enough to reach their accommodation with the contours of committed faith.

But not all.