The family in the Jesus movement

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2004 by Santiago Guijarro

The last question concerns the results of this mission and can be formulated in this way: What were the effects of the disciples' mission to households. There are two facts that can help answer this question. The first one is the contrast between the hospitality in houses (Q 10:5-7; Mark 6:10) and the rejection in the cities (Q 10:8-12; Mark 6:11) that we perceive in the instructions mentioned above. It seems that they refer to two successive phases of the mission. In the first phase the message was addressed to households. This phase had a much more positive result than the second one, in which the message was addressed to cities. The second fact is that this mission to households most probably gained some families for the Jesus movement. They offered hospitality and support to Jesus and his closest disciples in Galilee (Mark 1:29-31; 2:15-17, etc.), as well as in Jerusalem and its surrounding areas (Mark 11 : 11 ; 14:3-9; 12-16; Luke 10:38-42).

We can conclude, therefore, that Jesus sent his disciples into households to announce the good news of the kingdom through healing and open table-fellowship. The purpose of this commissioning was to reconstruct society from its roots, recreating in its basic cells, the households, the traditional values of solidarity and hospitality and establishing in them new relationships of brotherhood and sisterhood. The result of this mission was that some of the households joined actively in the Jesus movement and offered shelter and support for the leaders of the group.

The Failure and Continuity of the Jesus Movement

The peasant mass movement initiated by Jesus ended in failure, as many other mass movements did. The opposition it endured in Galilee discouraged many of its followers (John 6:66-71 ; Mark 8:27-30), but it was above all the events of the last days in Jerusalem that caused the end of the movement. In the Passion narratives, composed with didactic intentions, Judas' betrayal, the abandonment of the Twelve and Peter's denial play an important role, but what is more surprising in them is the change in attitude among the multitudes that had followed Jesus.

We must keep in mind that the arrest and death of Jesus took place during the Passover festival, when many pious Jews made pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is most likely that among those pilgrims there were some of Jesus' Galilean followers, who had accompanied him to the holy city (Mark 11:1-10). This fact makes more significant the contrast between the initial attitude of the multitudes that followed Jesus in Galilee and even cheered him upon entering Jerusalem, and their final reaction of rejection and condemnation.

In the Gospels we find some data that may help to explain this change. First, there is the influence of the priestly class, for which the movement initiated by Jesus surely constituted a threat. It is possible that they used the episode in the temple to turn the multitudes against Jesus, giving this symbolic action a meaning different from the one he intended (Sanders: 71-75). In agrarian societies the influence of the dominant classes over peasants is very great because peasants know that their subsistence depends on the elite. To this we may add that the pilgrims who accompanied Jesus could have perceived the action in the temple as an offense against the great symbol of Israelite tradition. All this would explain the change of attitude of the multitudes toward Jesus.