Our first family
If anything remains sacred in our culture, it’s the family. Yet Jesus challenged the family’s ultimacy.
A prevalent theme in popular culture fictions is the ultimacy of the family. In many television shows and movies, the goal of saving one’s family justifies extreme and even criminal behavior. Think of Walter White, the chemist turned meth cooker in Breaking Bad. Struck with terminal cancer and teaching high school on a mediocre salary, White turns his skills in a criminal direction, with wicked results that include the crashing of jetliners, death by drug overdoses and murder. It’s all, says Walt—as he earns millions of illicit dollars—for the good of his wife and two children.
Similar reasoning obtains for the ragtag group of zombie fighters in The Walking Dead. Their leader, Rick, not only slaughters zombies but even takes out a few humans. Desperately, he stabs his (admittedly unstable) best friend in the gut. It’s all for the sake of his pregnant wife and young son.
In the series Justified, the Harlan County (Kentucky) Bennett clan undertakes drug dealing and violence for the supposed betterment of the family. The Bennett matriarch sells family land to strip-mining coal companies so that her grandchildren will be able to escape the impoverished “holler” and live comfortably in the northern suburbs.
