Coming Out/Into Chosen Family: Jesus’ Queer Discipleship

Riley Pickett

Luke 14:25-35
25 Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26 “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. 28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31 Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. 33 So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. 34 “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? 35 It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; they throw it away. Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

A hallmark of the queer experience is that of “coming out.” For this paper, I define “coming out” as the act of openly revealing oneself as LGBTQ+. As I thought about this experience and all that comes with it, I began to think about what happens to family relationships once one is “out.” I thought of my own friends who have lost a mother, father, brother, and/or sister. The loss I refer to is the loss of relationship as they once knew it. In the aftermath of coming out, queer people are often forced to find chosen family—friends who become family. The queer community is adaptable and resilient in this way. We find family wherever we go. I chose Luke 14:25-35 because of these experiences. In the passage, Jesus instructs his followers to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself” (v. 26). What does Jesus mean by “hate”? What does this mean for our relationships with our family? With our own life and ourselves? What is the cost of following Jesus, and am I up for it? And what’s this strange line at the end about salt all about? These are the questions that emerged as crucial to understanding this passage.

I read this text as a queer Christian woman. I am white, cisgender, and graduate-level educated. I was born and raised, and remain in, a mainline Protestant denomination. All this to say that my experience of being queer has been a privileged one. I have not lost my family nor have I been excommunicated from my church. However, as a queer Christian, there are unique experiences that I hold, or at least can empathize with, because of my identity. As I approach the Bible, I bring with me this social location and it informs the way I read this collection of stories, which I expect to teach me something about who God is and who I am called to be in relationship to God. Bringing my queerness to the Bible, which I do inherently, is a gift. It bumps up against norms that I don’t fit into and illuminates what is already queer in the Bible. By already queer I mean what is already subversive, what is already turning things upside down and inside out. My queerness gives others permission to wrestle with these norms as well—helping them unlearn what they’ve been trained to believe. I believe this kind of queer reading can be taken up by people who do not identify as LGBTQ. It is a posture, or a standpoint, that can be learned and used to illuminate norms and uncover what was already queer.

This queer exegesis of Luke 14:25-35 will look at first-century Jewish and Hellenistic life in order to give context to the world in which Jesus was living and teaching. It will then use queer experiences, both my own and those of people from my community, to argue that Jesus’ discipleship has always been queer. It will do this by drawing comparisons between the queer experience of coming out and Jesus’ call to discipleship, and between the experience of chosen family and Jesus’ call to the alternative household of God. It will use a word study to help us better understand what Jesus was saying in his time. Through this exegesis I will argue that Jesus’ call to discipleship, a radically transformed life, is already queer.

First-Century Jewish/Hellenistic Households

As we think about queer people’s experiences with their families and the way in which coming out disrupts notions of traditional family values or structures, it’s important to know what “family” looked like in the time of Jesus. First, let’s look at traditional Jewish ideas of “family.” It’s important to note that “in the Hebrew Bible, there is no term for ‘family’ in the modern sense; there are, instead, various degrees of kinship from the ‘house of the father’ . . . to the clan . . . up to the tribe and the whole of Israel.”[i] Therefore, it is helpful to think of the Jewish family as the Jewish household. In the Roman world, a household “included children, unmarried relatives, slaves, and often also ‘freedmen and freedwomen or other renters of shop or residential property.’”[ii] Within both traditional Jewish households and in Hellenistic culture, it’s important to know that “the pater familias [the oldest living male in the household] had authority over the lives of his wife, children, slaves, and other household members.”[iii] The family household was closely tied to political structures as well: “The patriarchal household was the model for state authority, for it represented masculine hegemony over women, children, slaves, lesser males and workers.”[iv] In this way, almost all aspects of social and political life were centered around the idea of a patriarchal household. In this household, there were many generations. A dynamic member of the household would have been the son/s of the father, the head authority of the house, who belongs to the “intermediate generation, which is tied to important duties and tasks.”[v] The son/s, who is in the intermediate generation, lives “very much in the foreground, and indeed is about to succeed to the leadership of the household.”[vi] Examples of this scenario can be found throughout the Gospels--in Luke, you see this in 9:59-60. A man’s father has died and he, the would-be successor, wishes to bury him. Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (v. 60). Also relevant to our conversation around Luke is the idea that a typical disciple in this Gospel is “imagined as a member of the intermediate generation (he has parents and children) in a large household.”[vii] In Luke 14:26, a “typical disciple is a male who has a father and mother, who is married with children and who has brothers and sisters.”[viii]

The Cost of Committing to an Alternative Household

When Jesus called on his followers to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sister, yes, and even life itself” (14:26) he’s asking them to do a risky thing. What does Jesus mean by “hate”? The Greek word for “hate,” misei, doesn’t so much have to do with emotions, but with action. In his commentary on Luke, Robert Tannehill describes it like this: “In the ancient world, the terms love and hate referred less to emotions than to behavior that either honored or dishonored someone else. Hating one’s family meant doing something that injured them, particularly by disgracing them.”[ix] As we explored earlier, the household was an important social and political entity in Jewish/Hellenistic culture. Leaving one’s household created great conflict as it shook up the very structure of generational inheritance and dishonored the family in a culture which placed high value on the honor of the family. In this way, there was a cost attached to committing to becoming a disciple of Jesus. Transgressing norms is risky.

Those who choose to come out as LGBTQ in the 21st century likewise count the cost of committing to being our true selves. We may lose family, church communities, friends, jobs, and more. Yet we speak because we believe it is important. Audre Lorde talks about this importance of speaking: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.”[x] Lorde acknowledges the risk and so do I. We risk great loss, yet we choose life. What will it cost me to choose life? This is certainly a question I think about often, as I weigh my choices. For example, before I became engaged to my now-fiancé, I thought through who I was going to tell myself (as opposed to letting them find out on social media) and how I was going to tell them. With certain family members, there was a risk—there is always a risk—that they would not react in the way I desired them to react. It was possible that it would cost our relationship as I had always known it. I had to resolve myself to be okay—as in, my sense of self not swayed—regardless of their reaction. Of course, I had the right to be hurt and to grieve their rejection. But I resolved myself not to be swayed in a major way due to their reaction. I would speak because my silence, as Lorde says, would not protect me. Neither speaking nor being silent would protect me. But at least the speaking would honor my truth. As LGBTQ people, our speaking will cost us—certainly, it will. Our bold living-out of who we were created to be will make some people uncomfortable and angry. We will know loss and conflict and rejection.

I wonder if we can we embrace the paradox and irony that as we lose, we also gain. Jesus spoke this very hope to the disciples as they faced great loss and persecution. “The prospect that conventional family ties and the securities of life in this world are obstacles for faithful discipleship needs to be counterbalanced by other statements that emphasize the benefits of following him [emphasis mine].”[xi] Just a few chapters later in Luke 18, Jesus says to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life” (vv. 29-30). Yes, there is a cost attached to committing to a life following Jesus. For the disciples, this choice meant choosing to dishonor their family and join the ranks of the marginalized and persecuted in a movement that was outside the norms of the social and political culture. This notion of choice is taken up by Bovon in his commentary on Luke. Bovon explains how the disciples were making a choice and this “choosing [meant] knowing how to give things up, and especially how to part with them.”[xii]

When queer people choose to come out, they are making a choice knowing they could lose a lot. Perhaps in stepping into the unknown, at the risk of being misunderstood and rejected, we will also discover the freedom, peace, love and joy that come with committing to being all God has called us to be. As Jesus’ disciples essentially “died” to their families and to themselves, they were reborn, in a sense, into a new community, an alternative household. Likewise, when queer people come out, their closeted self “dies” and an “out-self” is reborn as one lives without the mask of pretending and begins to speak the truth of who they are. In verse 34, Jesus speaks of salt—when salt loses its taste/essence, it is worthless, not even fit for the “manure pile.” Jesus calls on us to listen to these words, to hear them, and let them inform our lives. Jesus “does not want us to lose our purpose or essence.”[xiii] The commitment Jesus speaks of will lead to a transformation of our identities. A new identity is shaped, one that more closely resembles our essence and the self God created us to be. Bovon goes on to describe Jesus’ call in chapter 14 as the call for a “reconstruction of one’s identity, not along ancestral lines or on the basis of one’s social status, but within the new community oriented toward God’s purpose and characterized by faithfulness to the message of Jesus.”[xiv] A new community.

This new community represents an alternative vision of community. Jesus is disrupting traditional, patriarchal households and creating “a new, alternative household of God”[xv] which “gave men and women a new freedom by subverting hierarchy and allegiance to the patriarchal household.”[xvi] Outside the norms, there was freedom. For men and women of this time, it was freedom to do something new, outside cultural and familial expectations. It put people of all stripes on equal footing. For men and women of this time, it was a choice to commit to this alternative vision of community, of family, of household. Queer people of the 21st century know something about chosen family as well—family that is created, not born into. Family that exists with no requirement of blood or marriage relationship. Queer people, who expand conceptions of what “family” means. For queer people of the 21st century, leaving the household of heteronormative culture and entering into the new, alternative household of God, we are given the freedom to exist as we are. Yes, for both the disciples and for us there was and is loss. But, as Jesus promises in scripture, there is great gain. This is the tension we live in. We live in the tension of Luke 14:25-35 with experience of and belief that the “particular kingdom beliefs and practices set forth by Jesus in Luke . . . are more life giving than societal norms and values, more life giving for the privileged, but especially for those on the margins.”[xvii]

Conclusion

Understanding the context of first-century Jewish and Hellenistic life shed light on the meaning of “family” in this time, which is better understood as a network of kin-relations, or households. Through this research, the stakes were revealed—followers who chose to commit to a life of discipleship with Jesus were risking social and political persecution as they deviated from the norms. LGBTQ people also risk a lot in their decision to come out, yet we speak because the gain often outweighs the potential loss. In scripture, Jesus indeed promised gain in the face of loss. We count the cost of committing to a life of following Jesus, or a life of being who were created to be, but we eventually make a choice. It is a bold and courageous choice to choose life in the midst of great fear and risk. After the commitment, transformation follows. Our identities are reshaped, not around norms, but within the alternative household of God where we regain our essence in Jesus Christ. Both the disciples and queer people of the 21st century can find freedom in this new vision of community—this chosen family. We are given the freedom to exist outside norms and to do a new thing. Yes, we live in a tension between loss and gain, but we have hope that in spite of the losses we gain life itself in choosing to commit to being who God has called us to be, whether that’s in choosing to come out or in choosing a life of following Jesus. It’s important for me to recognize the people who find themselves in circumstances where they are not safe or ready to come out. I do not mean to pressure or shame anyone for remaining closeted. It is not my decision or anyone else’s when or how a queer person chooses to come out. This is an intensely personal and contextual decision. However, I do want to stand by my claim that the LGBTQ coming out experience represents a beautiful example of coming into the alternative household of God, outside of the norms of our culture’s household. God works in mysterious ways and no one can escape the love and grace of God. No matter our status as “out” or “closeted,” we can commit to choosing daily a life of following Jesus and living in the alternative household of God.

Bibliography

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Frey, Jörg. “‘Family Values’ in the Gospel Tradition.” Theology Today 76, no. 3 (October 1, 2019): 209–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573619859021.

Goss, Robert. “Luke.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest. London: SCM, 2006.

Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1997.

Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

Nixon, G. Penny. “Luke 14:25-35.” In Feasting on the Gospels--Luke, Volume 2: A Feasting on the Word Commentary, edited by Cynthia A. Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.

Pesce, Mauro, and Adriana Destro. “Fathers and Householders in the Jesus Movement: The Perspective of the Gospel of Luke.” Biblical Interpretation 11, no. 2 (January 1, 2003): 211–38. https://doi.org/10.1163/156851503765661285.

Pickett, Raymond. “Luke 14:25-35.” In Feasting on the Gospels--Luke, Volume 2: A Feasting on the Word Commentary, edited by Cynthia A. Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson. Louisville, UNITED STATES: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.

Tannehill, Robert C. Luke. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.