Jesus Christ on Families

You know, when you think about it, it is really hard to come up with a quote from Jesus in the Gospels in which He praises families.

He just doesn't do it. He tells people, in multiple places, that they should abandon their families, and that families are sources of strife and division. But, apart from mentioning - in the context of divorce - that a man and woman will leave their families to cleave together, He just doesn't seem very interested in families or kids. 

Nor was He that big of a fan of heterosexual marriage. When He gave the teaching on divorce, the disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Now, Jesus does not use this opportunity to go into a panegyric on marriage and how wonderful it is. Instead, he starts praising celibacy:

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

That is pretty weak sauce on heterosexual marriage. He upholds the Old Testament teaching that heterosexual marriage is acceptable, and parents should be honored, but I cannot think of a passage where He praises marriage, or even praises motherhood or fatherhood.

When He wants to say something nice about mothers, He doesn't talk about human mothers. He talks about chickens. When a mother asks Him to cast demons out of her daughter, Jesus essentially calls her a bitch. 

The epistles are really not any better. The best Paul can say is to honor the marriage bed, and get married if you aren't good enough to be celibate and you don't want to burn (in hell), but there really isn't much support for family formation in the epistles either. Paul explicitly says that family formation is an impediment to holiness. That's as positive as he gets about it.

TLDR

Jesus only talks about works as a means of salvation, He never mentions grace at all, much less grace as a means of salvation.

Jesus' parables about wedding feasts always involve torture, punishment and death. Apart from a reference to honoring one's mother and father, he has nothing kind to say about marriage or parenthood.

In addition to his decidedly negative attitude towards marriage, Jesus never praises the begetting of children or the work of family formation. Instead, his references to family again primarily describe family as a place of combat and violence.

For Jesus and Paul, celibacy is the highest good. If the world had been successfully evangelized, and all Christians had followed this highest path to holiness, the human race would have disappeared from the planet by 150 AD.