What is a Family?
In some parts of our current political discourse, we fixate on finding simple definitions to words. What is capitalism? What is socialism? In her confirmation hearing for her appointment to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define “woman” by senator Marsha Blackburn. Her refusal to give a definition sparked quite a bit of commentary from people who claim that “woman” should be easy to define, and as much as many of us would like to think this is a simple thing, it isn’t. None of these definitions really fit on a bumper sticker conclusively. For example, you might say that a woman is a human with a uterus or with two X chromosomes if we want to be precise about genetics, but what would we say of people with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome? This is a condition in which someone is genetically male, but their body doesn’t respond to male sex hormones. The result is that though they are genetically male and don’t have a uterus, they have the external sex characteristics of a woman. Most people with AIS are raised as girls because that is what they appear to be. According to the simple definition of a woman, someone with AIS would be a man despite looking indistinguishable from a woman on the outside and being raised as a woman since birth. So, are people with AIS women, who they appear to be; men, who they look like genetically; or do we just exclude them from any category? Sometimes, the complexities of our world defy simple explanations.
With the complexities of definitions in mind, how would we define family? Maybe, a family is the people you are related to by blood, but that becomes tricky when we ask how far out we want to take that. If a person and I share a great-great-great grandparent, are we family? What about a great-great-great-great-great grandparent? Certainly, we share blood to some extent, but I think the only time I will find out about that is if I win the lottery. So maybe a family are those relatives that you share blood with and see fairly regularly. This narrows the field, but it has another problem: in-laws. If blood is a requirement, then some of my aunts and uncles are not family. I didn’t marry them, I have no blood connection to them. They would be out. And yet, it would be strange for me to consider my uncle Den family while excluding his wife Amy. Sometimes, I think I get along better with her than I do with him. She must be family. To make defining family even more complicated, what about those friends that we hold so dear that they are like siblings to us? Do they get to be family or are they excluded? Are roommates family in some way? Do pets count as family, or does it only include humans? What is a family?
Often, it is better to define things not by meeting certain specific requirements—that is how you drop people with AIS out of the field of human gender experience and kick pets out of the family—but rather by looking at a convergence of important characteristics. Rather than trying to provide a seven word definition for something complicated, we can offer several features we expect to see. Despite the fact that we regularly go to dictionaries as a resource of definitions, I think defining things by making a list of shared features is really more natural to us. If I asked you to define a tree, you’d probably list a few characteristics that all trees tend to share, even if not every tree shares each of them.
If you’re on board with this idea, I think that a close reading of Genesis 12:3 gives us an important feature by which we can define “family.” When we think of defining features that most families have in common, we might think of loving long-term relationships, parents and children, a household, cousins and other extended family members, a shared history, but Genesis 12:3 gives us another feature to consider. This verse is made up of three statements. God will bless those who bless Abram. God will curse the one that curses Abram. And all the families of the earth will be blessed in Abram.
The first pattern we should notice is the object receiving blessing or curses from God. Those receiving blessing are plural. There is a group of people receiving blessing. The one receiving a curse is singular. The cursed one is alone. Finally, families are blessed in Abram, and one characteristic I think we can all agree upon with families is that they are collective. There is no such thing as a family of one. So blessings here are going to groups, collections of people, while the curses are going to individuals.
The second important thing we should notice is that all the families of the earth are blessed in Abram. This isn’t just Abram’s family. This isn’t just the people he interacts with. God intends to bless the entire world through Abram. There is no group that God intends to exclude. God’s love goes out to everyone, even those who don’t know, trust, believe in, or love God. God’s blessing of Abram is the means through which God is going to bless the entire world.
And that connects to the third thing. This blessing of Abram isn’t just a promise of prosperity to this one righteous man. This is God’s work in the world. God is engaged in the act of mission, moving through the world to redeem it through God’s boundless love and grace. Christians see the ultimate fulfillment of this in the work of Christ. God’s blessing of Abram isn’t the boss passing down a bonus to a favorite worker. This is God actively participating in the life of the world.
With this in mind, we can reframe what it means to bless or curse Abram. For people to despise or love Abram is for them to accept and support or reject and oppose God’s work in the world. Cursing Abram isn’t just saying an unkind word about the man, it is cursing the blessed one through whom God intends to bless the world. Rejecting Abram is rejecting God.
Perhaps God would need to punish such a person, but at the same time, their punishment may already be upon them. The fact that individuals curse Abram while groups bless him seems to indicate that opposing God’s work in the world requires someone to be isolated, disconnected from the greater human community, cut off from family. Cursing God’s work comes from a place of pain and exclusion. One finds themselves alone in hating God.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of people who don’t believe in God, or even who outwardly hate God. And they can certainly find communities of their own, though I think many people hate the Church and what it says about God, rather than actually hating God directly. If God’s work is to bring blessing to all the families of the earth, to help everyone, to love everyone, then to reject that, one’s heart must already be hardened by trauma and distrust.
On the other hand, if families are being blessed and those who are being blessed are those who bless Abram, the implication is that a family is a group that blesses the work of God in the world. I don’t want to imply with this reading that only Christian and Jewish families are actually families. I reject that outright. But God’s work is bigger than a religious belief system. God’s work is about love and compassion, bringing people together. In that sense, a family is a group of people who love each other and share that love outwardly with the world. One defining characteristic of a family is that they participate in the mission of love, making the world a better place.
Of course, many families have suffered trauma and perhaps don’t know how to live up to this calling. That doesn’t exclude them from being families. I’m sure my own family hasn’t always done their best to love the world. But maybe in our ongoing cultural discourse on what family means and what family values truly are, we should include loving one another and sharing that care with the world. We should pray for those who feel like they are under God’s curse, isolated, alone, in pain. We should pray for families who struggle to love each other, let alone share that with the world. And we should examine our own families. Whoever you consider to be part of your family, how have you all shared in God’s mission to love the world?
