“For Advent, we handed out tags for people to write down prayer requests. By far, the number one prayer for restoration is for families.” In two sentences, I heard a believable and all-too-familiar story.
What do so many want for Christmas? Peace.
The longing for peace at home shouldn’t surprise us. Themes of peace and home permeate the holiday season. Commercials, movies, and songs project Rockwellesque visions of serene families gathering in warm, glowing abodes.
Perry Como croons, “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” as Bing Crosby promises, “I’ll be home for Christmas (if only in my dreams).” Cherubic choirs pray, “Let there be peace on earth — and let it begin with me.”
Even our carols embellish the first family Christmas gathering with idealized tranquility — “All is calm, all is bright, ’round yon virgin mother and child! Holy infant, so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace.”
Yet far too frequently, families are scattered, and peace is a stranger. In some homes, the family will never be together again. Divorce and death have had their way. Children will gather around the tree, their joy tamped by the newness of Dad’s absence. A daughter’s stocking hangs untouched. Grandpa’s recliner remains unoccupied as the family sings carols by the fire. A son didn’t — and never will — return from war.
In other homes, everyone will be there, even though they don’t want to be. Bitterness, division, and resentment occupy the dinner table. The estranged loved one’s laughter is absent. Cousins, once inseparable but now divided by culture wars, cannot exchange a greeting. And the sweetness of Aunt Carol’s sugar cookies cannot overcome the bitterness of the brothers at odds over an inheritance.
We shouldn’t be surprised by dysfunctional families. The home has been messed up as long as sin has been in the world (see Gen 3:16). A brother bludgeons his brother to death and shrugs when asked about it (Gen 4:5). A dad gets drunk and passes out naked where his sons can see him (Gen 9:21–25).
A husband tells his wife to pretend she’s his sister, allowing her to be taken into a king’s household, subjecting her to danger in order to protect himself — an act later imitated by his son (Gen 12:13–15, 26:7–11). Later, that same wife tells her husband to impregnate her slave so that she can have a child — only to despise him, the slave, and the child (Gen 16:1–6; 21:8–10). Eventually, they have their own son, who has two boys of his own.
One of those sons (and his scheming mother) deceives his father and cheats the other son out of his blessing (Gen 27:1–40). Naturally, the cheated son wants to kill his thieving brother (Gen 27:41). To avoid being murdered, the cheater is sent off under the auspices of finding a wife, which he does. However, he wakes up the morning after the wedding to find himself deceived by his father-in-law, who swapped his fiancée with her older sister. So he hangs out for another seven years until he can marry the other sister too (Gen 29:16–30).
Those sister-wives get into a conception competition that involves sex with slaves and a weird incident in which one wife pays the other wife mandrakes so that she can have sex with their husband that night — all of which results in the birth of 12 sons and a daughter (Gen 29:31–30:24).
One of those sons has a son who dies but refuses to provide a husband for his widowed daughter-in-law. She knows her father-in-law is partial to prostitutes, so she dresses up as one and sleeps with him, taking his personal effects as security for payment. When it becomes clear that she’s pregnant, he commands that she (and her unborn) be burned to death, at which point she produces his effects, forcing him to say, “My bad! I’m the dad!” He lets her live and give birth to his twin sons (Gen 38:1–30).
That saga (which doesn’t even take us past the first book of the Bible) isn’t some random dysfunctional family Moses decided to record because there’s some moral of the story for us to learn. No, that family is recorded in God’s inspired word because it’s the most important family line in history. It’s the family of Jesus.
Jesus was not born into a family marked by peace, or shalom, the wholeness God intended in creation. Jesus was born into one of the most dysfunctional families in history. The Bible doesn’t try to hide that fact. It’s right there, in all its maladjusted, daytime talk show, reality TV, sick, and twisted brokenness. It’s front and center, highlighted in his genealogy, demanding that we see it (Matt 1:1–11).
Jesus was born in Bethlehem because that was his ancestral hometown — “the house of the family line of David” (Luke 2:1–7). You know David, the king who sent soldiers to take Bathsheba so he could have sex with her — while her loyal soldier husband was off fighting David’s wars. David, who then murdered Bathsheba’s husband to try to cover it up (2 Sam 11). That’s the family Jesus was born into, a family deeply marred by the chaos of sin.
But that’s good news. It means God saw dysfunction — and he did not turn away. God sent his Son to dwell in our mess and save us from it. He was born into a broken home to bring grace to our broken homes — and to bring us to a home that will never be broken.
At the cross, God the Son received in his body the condemnation that our rebellion deserves. In his resurrection, chaos and the curse are conquered. God the Father adopts us as his own, making us beloved heirs in his family (Gal 3:27–4:7). God the Son unashamedly calls us brothers and sisters (Heb 2:11). Through God the Spirit, the Father and the Son make their home with us (John 14:23). And one day, God will raise us from the dead to be at home with him forever (Rev 21:1–3).
But his grace is not reserved for the future. Jesus is willing and able to help us love our present familial chaos. Jesus understands life in a dysfunctional family. He was born into one because “he had to be like his brothers and sisters in every way” (Heb 2:17). He sympathizes with our weakness because he was tempted by everything that comes with family chaos — and he never sinned (Heb 4:15). He knows the temptation to respond in sin — and knows how to overcome it by faith. And because of that, we can “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need” (Heb 4:16).
While we wait for the peace of our forever home, let’s be present in our broken homes, bearing good news of great joy for all the dysfunctional families: “Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:11).
