25 June ST LUKE’S ENMORE The Revd Michael Deasey
Matt 10.24–29
‘I have come not to bring peace, but a sword’.
William Goettler is the dean of ministry studies at Yale University and once wrote about his mother-in-law, Connie, a devout and faithful Christian, who nevertheless took exception to something in this gospel passage. She insisted Jesus is going too far. The Jesus she knows comes to bring peace, not a sword. She has spent long enough around the church to recognise that discord happens within the community of the faithful, but her Jesus would never have encouraged such division in the family. How, she wonders, did this ever get into the bible?
Today’s gospel is a bit of a roller coaster of difficult and confronting sayings of Jesus, but it’s quite gentle compared to the parallel passage in Luke chapter 14 which says ‘whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’. All this in an ancient culture and society where there were no government agencies. Families meant everything. All protection and security depended on the family.
It’s all very well to rationalise or sanitise the difficult sayings of Jesus, or gloss over them as just a collection of instructions given to the disciples as they set out on a particular mission, but we need to address Connie’s concern, especially as every Christian congregation on Earth will have those who have experienced family break-up, dispute or discord, where daughters and mothers, and sons and fathers, wives and husbands, have indeed been set against each other.
There may be two ways to address this issue. First, is this text actually saying what it seems to be saying on the surface? While a religious cult leader might turn to a superficial reading of these verses to justify splitting families apart, Jesus is actually addressing the faithful who seek to live out their Christian faith while facing conflict and discouragement, and even the threat to their physical well-being, because of the call of the gospel.
And second, is the method he uses.
Because one thing we know is that Jesus used the art forms of his day in order to make a point – most notably in his use of parables, but also hyperbole, the extreme statement to drive home a message. We also need to understand that in the Hebrew tradition, a culture that governed the whole writing of scripture, extreme and dramatic contrasts were common; light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and hate. Whereas our western culture would say ‘I prefer this to that’, that culture tended to say ‘I love this and hate that’. So, for the followers of Jesus, to hate their families meant nothing else but to give them a subordinate place in their affections. It means that ties of kinship, no matter how close, must not interfere with their absolute commitment to the kingdom. And there’s a bonus. Jesus not only takes precedence over all others, but he provides a new family, a new community – aptly described in the baptismal service as the Household of Faith.
If we are going to be followers of Christ, we can’t deny there is a cost, there will be sacrifice. But nothing like the cost and sacrifice that Jesus has made. Oswald Chambers writes: ‘The cost was those thirty years in Nazareth, those three years of popularity, scandal and hatred, the deep unfathomable agony in Gethsemane, and the onslaught of Calvary – the pivot upon which the whole of time and eternity turns. Jesus has counted the cost – no one is going to laugh at him and say ‘this man began to build, and was not able to finish’.
And in gospel passages such as we have today, Jesus implies that the only people he can really use to build up the kingdom are those who love him personally, passionately and devotedly beyond any of their closest ties on earth. But the conditions seem to be too stern.
They might include possessions. In another hyperbolic statement from Luke chapter 14, Jesus says: ‘None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions’. That in itself might seem a bit like losing our life for his sake. Again, we are confronted with choice. As with family, it’s all to do with priorities. There’s nothing wrong with possessions. Jesus cultivated the rich as well as the poor. The problem comes when possessions possess us — when they become more important than our allegiance to Christ.
Philip Yancey tells the story of a corporate high-flyer, but a spiritual seeker, who interrupted a busy life to spend a few days in a monastery. ‘I hope your stay is a blessed one’ said the monk who showed the visitor to his cell. ‘If you need anything, let us know and we’ll teach you how to live without it’.
If today’s gospel is fierce in its challenge to commitment, it also tells us that we are loved and valued by God. ’Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows’. Everything about love and commitment in Matthew’s gospel reflects the call of Jesus in the Sermon on the mount to be the salt of the earth.
Christians are not called to be bulldozers, not to arrogantly impose our will and opinions on believers and non-believers alike; not called to criticize and to admonish; not called to preach at and sit in judgement on others; not called to join the religious right or the intolerant left; not necessarily called to live the heroic life that will grab the headlines and be the subject of biographies, but to make a difference in the world, or our little part of it.
We are called to true discipleship, which is to be salt in a world that has gone bland; to be a light in a world that stumbles in darkness; and to be a community that is worshipping, welcoming, hospitable and loving.