House Rules
We Brits have a complex relationship with our houses. The need to get a foot on, and then climb up the property ladder is almost taken for granted. Huge amounts of time, money, physical and emotional energy are daily ploughed into maintaining our houses. Many people spend half their working lives earning enough to keep their homes.
 Behind all this activity, we locate much of our value and identity in our properties. In Winston Churchill's words: 'We shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildings shape us.'
'Where do you live?' is perceived to be a crucial question for determining social worth. On a symbolic level, our dwellings condition imagination and expectation. We seek to turn these spaces into homes, use them as canvases for self-expression and places of escape. Houses figure prominently in our memories, our desires and our fears.
Christians would do well to reflect on how houses shape our lives and imaginations. Are our houses idols, burdens or distractions? Can we square our culture's obsession with houses with following the one placed in a manger, with 'no place to lay his head' (Matthew 8:20)? How do we understand Jesus' statement that 'everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life' (Matthew 19:29)?
Interestingly, Jesus makes the house a key locus for his ministry. It is in the home that people are taught (Mark 7:17, 10:10), healed (Matthew 8:14, Luke 8:51) and experience salvation (Luke 19:9). The house becomes a context of God's activity and a place of expectancy. The house itself is thereby radically re-orientated. Jesus does not comment on financial, practical or aesthetic implications when people break through a roof to bring a sick man to him (Mark 2:4). He redirects the activity of a home to make it a place of attentiveness when with Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). He welcomes the outcast into the home of strangers (Luke 7:36) and makes the dinner table a context of intense theological consequence by eating with sinners (Mark 2:15, Luke 5:29, 14:12).
Jesus forces us to question what it means to have our house in. Perhaps we should begin by reflecting on this question: are we living to keep a house, or is our house enabling us and others flourish?
Author: Ben Care
Copyright LICC and reproduced by kind permission. To receive LICC’s inspirational bi-weekly emails called Word for the Week and Connecting with Culture, email mail@licc,org,uk
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