Luke 12:49-56
August 15, 2010
Summer time is when the livin’ is supposed to be easy. But here, in the church on Sunday mornings this summer, it feels like we’ve come across our fair share of biblical passages that are anything but easy. For weeks we’ve waded through prophets who, speaking on behalf of God, were railing against the people using language of violence and destruction. And just when we thought we could chalk it up to the Old Testament being the Old Testament, this week we have one of those difficult New Testament passages; the Prince of Peace claiming he did not, in fact, come to bring peace, but rather division.
In fact, this passage is chalk full of difficult things. Besides the Jesus not bringing peace thing, we have Jesus’ animosity toward families, the fire he seems to want to bring into our world, and his harsh words to the “hypocrites”, as he calls them, and as many of us know ourselves to be at times. Oh how I wish I could explain these away. Jesus sounds so angry and I don’t want Jesus to be angry.
But remember – Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and as he goes he is claiming an authority that is upsetting more and more people. Whatever we understand the Prince of Peace to mean, we can’t deny that Jesus’ life was upsetting to some – if not most. And he sparked a major conflict between himself and the religious and political authorities. They do, after all, end up killing him. Discord was undoubtedly a part of Jesus’ life – Prince of Peace or not.
In this passage, Jesus tells us discord is a part of what happens when the love of God enters this world. But it seems counter-intuitive. Love is good, right? The realm of God, the one Jesus brought near, is what we strive for because of the visions we have of what it would be like: everyone equal – war no more – garland instead of ashes. So why does Jesus say he came not to bring peace, but division? Why does he talk about coming to bring fire to the earth? That doesn’t sound very loving to me; that doesn’t sound very realm-of-God-like to me.
But the problem is God’s love looks so different from what generally passes for love in our world. God’s realm looks so different from the realms human beings have created. We think we know love because we love our families and friends. We know how strong that feeling is. And we know both the joy of that love and the pain such love can bring when these relationships are severed for any reason.
Families are the home base for what we know of love. It’s really the basis we have for trying to understand God’s love. We call God Mother and Father – we call churches families – our brothers and sisters in Christ. Idealized, romanticized family love, whether it reflects the reality of our families or not, is the standard for what we imagine of God’s love, the love that exists in God’s realm and the love God wants for this world. But our definitions of and expectations of family maybe don’t look like how Jesus imagined family.
The given-ness of the goodness of families was even stronger in Jesus’ day. We talk these days about the social fabric being dependent on good healthy families raising good healthy children. But in their day, they were even more dependent on this. It wasn’t just about loving your children and spouses making compromises. Families were the basis for the economy – for survival. When a son left the family, the family suffered not just the loss of someone they loved, but economic loss and vulnerability as well. That’s what makes Jesus’ statement about how he came to divide families so shocking. Why would he want that – to cause such loss and vulnerability?
Well, what he wanted was to completely upset the systems based on power and hierarchy – and family was one such system in his day. The relationships he names that will be disrupted are the ones of power – parent over child. I don’t think Jesus was wanting every family to fight – he was speaking in terms people understood in order to talk about how he came to upset power systems of the day. Jesus had a different definition of power – a different understanding of how power works and who should benefit from power. Power that brings injustice is what Jesus sought to dismantle – and dismantling that kind of power does not happen without great resistance.
I read an editorial in the New York Times on Wednesday. The author, Amy Bach, was arguing for an index that would rank local judicial systems in a similar way colleges are ranked in our country. She called it the “justice indicator.” There would be various criteria and the judicial system would get rated on each one; Things like recidivism rate, civil protections, bail figures, crime reduction and the like. The idea is once the justice systems in various cities across the nation were ranked, you would have another thing to look at as you choose where you want to live. In some ways, I found it an amusing article. While the issue of how well judicial systems do or don’t work is a serious one, Bach was positing that creating a “justice indicator” would be easy:
“A justice index,” she writes, “would be relatively straightforward to create… A panel of lawyers, community representatives, statisticians and law professors would establish standards for the measurements.”
Sure – no problem. Get those folks together in a room and I’m sure they would all easily agree on what criteria to use to determine whether a justice system was working well or not.
After being a little amused by this, I started thinking about what it would be like to have a justice indicator for our lives, our churches, our country. And even more, I wonder what it would be like if Jesus were the one coming up with the criteria. We’d like to think that Jesus’ standards would be pretty similar to the criteria we middle class Americans use to decide whether or not we’re “good” – whether or not we’re “just”. But I’m afraid that probably isn’t so. Jesus’ definitions of “good” and “just” were different from the conventional definitions of his day, and they would be different now – and that’s where the divisions and disruptions come in.
Jesus was not a twenty-first-century, university-educated, landowning husband and father; small wonder, then, that he frequently doesn't talk or act like a twenty-first century, university-educated, landowning husband and father. That can make it hard sometimes to listen to and really hear the things he says. We all spend a lot of time trying to be good and respectable. We try to fit in and be “good guys and gals.”
But Jesus wasn’t a “good guy”, at least not in most people’s eyes. Not by the standards of his day.
A "good son" would have stayed home and worked at the family's trade to care for his mother until her death; he wouldn't have gone off gallivanting around the countryside. A "good man" would defend the family name and honor if challenged or attacked – yet Jesus spoke harshly of his own family. And as if all of this isn't bad enough, Jesus actually encourages other people to leave their homes and families, to allow their family name and honor to be dismantled by others in order to follow him and to follow his example.
Following Jesus won't make you a "good guy" or "good gal" by most conventional standards. As Sarah Dylan writes, “How it came to be that so many people would think of Christianity as a ticket to respectability and an affirmation of the "core values" of a society with a vast and growing gap between rich and poor, insiders and outsiders, powerful and marginal, is one of history's most astonishing tricks to me.”
If our world were nothing but a place of created goodness and profound beauty, a space of flourishing for all, just and life-giving for all in God’s creation, then Jesus’ words about bringing division would be deeply troubling. If, on the other hand, our world is deeply marred and scarred, death-dealing for many life forms, with systems that are exploitative and nonsustainable, then redemption can come only when those systems are shattered and consumed by fire.
This is the basis of the conflict Jesus envisions. He comes not to disturb a nice world, but to shatter the disturbing and death-dealing systems that stifle life. And in our passage, he’s basically saying to those of us in such systems, we can choose to follow him or we can stay where we are, but if we stay we will be divided against him and those who follow him. The truth is, if we are going to choose Jesus as our authority – if we are going to follow Jesus – we will need to extricate ourselves from systems and institutions that don’t meet Jesus’ criteria of justice.
I think when Jesus said he did not come to bring peace – he meant he did not come to bring peace as those in power around him understood it. The peace of Rome – the peace of a well-run temple – the peace of a family where everyone is in their rightful place – the peace of stability at all costs – the peace that comes from suppression of legitimate dissent. These types of peace leave injustice firmly in place. They are not the peace of God which surpasses all understanding. The peace of this world might meet our standards, but it won’t always measure up to Jesus’ justice indicators.
Jesus is the Prince of Peace – Jesus did come to bring the realm of God near and show us how to make it visible even now, in this world. But that will be hard for some, and it will probably require us to make choices others will reject and judge. We might even have to make choices that will distance us from people we love who choose to remain in the systems of power Jesus wants us to dismantle.
At the end of worship today, we will be singing the familiar hymn, “Take My Life.” It is heavy with 19th century, male centered language. It also makes many illusions to Jesus as king, as the one sitting on the throne. Because of this, too often we think of Jesus’ authority looking like royal, regal authority. But I think Frances Havergal, the one who wrote this hymn, in his 19th century way, was trying to make the point that when we follow Jesus, when we give our lives to Jesus, Jesus replaces those kinds of authority with the authority he brought. His power comes through weakness. His justice serves the last first. He brings good news to the sinners and those stuck under the weight of systems ruled by those we traditionally think of as “in power.”
This is good news for those who suffer under the systems of power today, but let’s be honest…it does not sound like good news to the people who depend on those systems and institutions for their safety and comfort. In this fiery passage Jesus is claiming authority – authority to define what matters in our lives and the world. He’s reminding us that if we choose him – choose him as our only authority – we’re rejecting other people, other authorities, other systems, other ways of life that do not reflect the realm of God. With so many people and systems trying to claim authority for our lives the choice is often difficult. But when you compare the realm of God to the systems of oppression and injustice today, is there really any other choice? Amen.
