Jesus was definitely not the family values guy Christian’s tout. He said to the man who told him he couldn’t go with him because his father was being buried, “Let the dead bury the dead.” Which, by the way, is one of Jesus’ most sarcastic and funny lines, in my opinion. The people of ritual are dead, it doesn’t matter, they’re doing a meaningless act, which anyone who’s stood in a graveyard and listened to a priest or pastor recite some passage from the Bible knows is true. Unless… you put stock in ritual, in which case, you’d be dead to Jesus, since you weren’t experiencing the “life breath,” or as it’s terribly translated, the holy spirit. When Jesus’ family came to see him, and he was inside a house talking to his followers and students, he was told they were outside, and he said, paraphrasing, ‘you who are here listening to me are my family.’ If you were part of the movement and truly understood and followed what he said, then you’d have great reward. The whole idea was to leave behind all the attachments to the world and live only in the moment of the life breath. This was a spiritual awakening, a condition of joy, insight and spontaneous compassion. Staying home to be a faithful son or daughter wasn’t honoring your parents, to Jesus. To be alive in the life breath was honoring God and life itself, and if your parents could accept that and follow Jesus, what greater honor could you do them? Jesus was laying out a new paradigm of how to live, and that was it, pretty much. You couldn’t be halfway with it.