This is no trivial detail – a product of the fact that (unlike Simon and Andrew, in the previous verses) the sons of Zebedee happened to be on a job with their dad on the day when Jesus called them.  It’s a pattern that Matthew keeps returning to through the rest of his gospel.  For the disciples, the call to follow Jesus means literally leaving the family and the family business to travel around Galilee and Judea to go on the road with the itinerant rabbi Jesus.

This side of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, ‘following’ Jesus obviously doesn’t mean wandering around Galilee with him.  But the core question of whether you are prepared to rank your loyalty to him even higher than your loyalty to family (and Jesus ranks that pretty highly) does not fade away at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry.

When Jesus sends his disciples on mission in Matthew 10, he gives instructions that seem to be deliberately intended (eg. v. 18) to anticipate some aspects at least of the mission to the Gentiles that they will be sent out on after the resurrection.  His words in vv. 21-22 and 34-37 about being prepared to endure even the hatred and opposition of your brother or your father or your children are repeated in more general terms in Matt. 24:10.

The ‘leaving’ decision in this age may not always be the decision to leave a secular career for a paid ministry job – in fact for most Christians it won’t be that – but it may be.  Or it may be a decision to do the same job in a different part of the world, for the sake of Jesus and the gospel, or a host of other decisions that involve forsaking comforts and possessions and opportunities in order to serve God’s mission in the world.

The preparedness to ‘leave’ and to be ‘hated’ – even by your own father – is at the heart of what it means to be a disciple.

* David is married to Nicole and is the father of Jacob, Rebecca and Elsie. For work he lectures at Morling College in Sydney.

The God fearing father in Israel was concerned for more than himself and his time. He knew the importance of passing on the ‘decrees’ of God and the story of Israel, so that the nation might ‘always prosper and be kept alive’ (Deuteronomy 6:24). Personally he looked forward to the blessing of seeing his children’s children (Psalm 128). Israel, of course, were not particularly good at following decrees, including decrees to pass on decrees, and so we find the time of Malachi assuming an age in which fathers were indifferent or hostile towards their children, waiting for a future age when this would no longer be the case.

Jesus, then, brought in an age where we would once again be concerned for those who came after us, for our biological children, yes, but also for children generally – witness Jesus’ response to those who would seek to stop children getting to Jesus (e.g. Luke 18). Sadly, it seems that this age has not arrived for some men. We remain, I think, frightened that children will get in the way of all the Things we would like to Do, and it has become passé for us to speak ill of them; I, for one, was never challenged about my “blood relative” rule.

Now if Malachi was referring only to the work of John the Baptist in those few short years before Jesus took over, then perhaps we don’t have anything to worry about. If, however he was also pointing to the pattern of life that would become evident as people started following Jesus – then it is a different matter (see the rest of Malachi 4:6 to get what I’m talking about). If that is the case then reversing men’s attitude to children becomes one of those Things we ought to Get Done.

Marriage and Sex : Why? :: Dominic Steele from Christians in the Media on Vimeo.

Now I’m assuming that a good number of us are already married, so to avoid this question being purely hypothetical let me rephrase: What is a good age for your children to get married? Most of us I think will answer something like “mid-twenties”. And if we were to be asked whether we thought it was a good idea to get married at 18 most of us would answer “No”.

Behind these answers I think are two thoughts about maturity; one about its timing, and one about its goodness. Before I am misunderstood, let me clarify:

• I AM NOT SAYING EVERYONE NEEDS TO GET MARRIED
• I AM NOT SAYING EVERYONE NEEDS TO GET MARRIED YOUNG
• I AM NOT SAYING THERE ARE NOT GOOD REASONS TO DELAY MARRIAGE
• YOU CAN BE A TRUE/REAL/MATURE/GODLY MAN WITHOUT BEING MARRIED, JESUS WAS (and yes, I was shouting)

I am saying though, that our attitude to those who marry young (and to the prospect of our children marrying young) diagnoses and discloses some things we believe about maturity – and it is the attitude I wish to challenge.

The first aspect of this attitude concerns the timing of maturity – simply we do not expect it to coincide with adulthood. Now at one level it’s a good thing we don’t expect it to coincide with adulthood – as it rarely does. It is quite another though to think it’s a good thing. So often “I’m not mature enough for the responsibilities of marriage” really means, “I’m not mature enough for the responsibilities of marriage and I’m really happy about that fact.”

And perhaps our joy at delaying maturity comes from the fact that we have a negative view about it: we simply don’t believe maturity is good. Certainly we may concede its necessity, but only reluctantly so. The parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) tells the story of servants with varying levels of ‘productivity’. The productive servants are rewarded, the unproductive servant are punished. Notice the reward. The productive servants get more opportunity for productivity. The parallel in reality is something like this: the reward for faithful service of Jesus… is the opportunity for more faithful service of Jesus. This only makes sense if serving Jesus is good; if serving Jesus is not only duty but delight, not only obligation but joy, not only what is right to do, but what is good to do. It is the same with maturity. And perhaps if we became more convinced about the goodness of maturity we would welcome it a little more readily.

When Jesus wanted to give an example of how the people of his day used religious traditions to dodge the word of God, the particular word from God that he picked out to focus on was Moses’ commandment to ‘honour your Father and your mother’.  According to Jesus, God is not impressed by people who use religious commitments as an excuse for avoiding the more difficult and God-honouring task of honouring their parents – really, genuinely honouring them, in a way that costs time and money and continues all the way to the time when they are demented and dying.

We will have some translating to do in order to apply these words of Jesus to our own situation.  We are not under the law of Moses, and we don’t have a ‘korban’ tradition that we could use to hide from it even if we were.  But we worship the same God who commanded the Israelites to honour their fathers and their mothers, and the way we honour Him is tied up with the way we honour them.

These aspects are of course related:
Taking responsibility for people will involve any number of tasks, and taking responsibility for tasks may involve a whole lot of people. However it remains that our responsibilities will almost inevitably take the shape of:

• A number of ‘jobs’ (whether paid or volunteer)
• A number of people (perhaps a wife and children, an extended family as
  well as a few others in the church and community)

I went on to suggest that taking responsibility for task (or ‘jobs’) had its own
two-fold shape, summed up in firstly the Creation Mandate (Genesis 1:28) and
secondly The Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). The temptation is to see
these as competitors to each other, or to see the second eradicating the first. This
is to confuse ‘new age’ with ‘new creation’. The resurrection has indeed brought
about a new age, but the old creation remains for the moment, and with it, its
 mandates.

Secondly it fails to adequately draw the connections between the two. The call of Genesis was to bring order and create life, the fall wreaked disorder, death and destruction; Jesus brings new life and new order. Fulfilling the Great Commission will inevitably have implications for the people we take responsibility for, but it will also mean that we will make one or more of our ‘jobs’ something that contributes specifically to the cause of ‘making disciples’, the cause of advancing the name of Jesus.

Raising up children for Abraham and teaching them to walk in his ways was a serious business, and the whole Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi (e.g. Mal. 2:15), is full of reminders of how important God saw it as being.

Which is why John the Baptist’s words in Matthew 3:9 are so jolting.  God doesn’t need Israel and the children of the Israelites.  If he wants to, he can raise up children for Abraham from the stones by the side of the Jordan river.

At one level (a bit like the story of the virgin birth) John’s words function as a huge challenge to human fatherhood and family.  Viewed as an end in itself, human fatherhood and family is an idol that God is perfectly prepared to cut down and bypass.

At another level, John’s words are an urgent call to take the business of raising up children for Abraham a whole lot more seriously.  The fact that God has an axe at the root of the trees, ready to cut down the trees that don’t bear fruit, is not a reason to give up on being a tree.  It’s a reason to bear fruit.

No-one is automatically a child of God, simply by virtue of being born into the right family - this side of the cross, as the gospel goes out to the nations, that is even clearer than it was in John’s preaching.  People enter God’s family not by birth but by the new birth, through the work of the Spirit (cf. John 1:13; 3:6; Rom. 2:29).  But the normal means by which the Spirit works is through God’s word (cf. 1 Peter 1:23), which can be learned from infancy and is able to make a person wise for salvation and equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:15-16).

So whatever else we fathers do in our lives (including our ‘ministry’ lives), we ought to be praying for God’s Spirit to be at work in our kids’ hearts to give them saving faith in Jesus, and teaching them (by word and example, with discipline and patience) what the word of God says and how to believe and obey it.

If we do everything else except those things, then our fatherhood is falling catastrophically short of what it was created for.  John’s words to Israel carry an echo that functions as a warning for us.  God offers no guarantee of permanence to half-hearted faith and obedience half-heartedly passed on from generation to generation.  There is an axe at the root of the tree.

God can do without human fatherhood – he managed to bring the Messiah into the world without even needing to use one of us as a sperm donor.

But just as Joseph’s story in Matthew 1-2 provides us with a deliberately humiliating reminder of how dispensable we human fathers are, it also gives us an extraordinary example of how God uses us and our fatherhood in his plans.

When God breaks the news to Joseph that Mary’s child is from the Holy Spirit, he immediately gives Joseph two commands:

First, he tells Joseph not to be afraid to marry Mary. Unlike his ancestor Ahaz, whose decisions were ruled by the fear of men, Joseph is to fear God and despise the social shame that he will incur by marrying Mary.

And second, he tells Joseph that when Mary’s child is born, ‘You shall call his name Jesus’. The main emphasis in that command (as the rest of the verse goes on to explain) is on the last word: You shall call his name Jesus. But the first word in the sentence is significant too: You shall call his name Jesus. Joseph is to name the child, and take on the responsibility of fathering him. Which he does (verse 25).

And then, in the following chapter (vv. 13-14, 19-21) it is Joseph’s actions as a husband and father that God uses to save the life of the Saviour of the world. All we know about Joseph’s life from the gospels is that he chose to marry Mary when God told him to, that he worked a job as a carpenter (Matt. 13:55) and that he acted to protect his family when they were in danger.

Marrying, working, protecting a family – nothing fancy or religious here, just the basic, secular, ordinary realities of human fatherhood as God created it to function (under the pressure of some extraordinary circumstances and assisted by the odd dream) lived out by a man who feared God and trusted his word, and used by God as part of his plans to save the world.