Matthew 10:24-39
June 22, 2014
I have a confession:
Sometimes when I’m trying to get someone to do something, I make it
sound ever so slightly easier than I suspect it will be. Not a lot, and I honestly think sometimes I
don’t really know I’m doing it. But
sometimes I know better and do it anyway; because, you see… I’m afraid. I’m afraid the person won’t say “yes” if they
know how hard it’s really going to be.
In this – and many other things as well – I am nothing like Jesus. The disciples couldn’t have said they didn’t
know what they were getting themselves into.
Well, they could have, but they would be thick-headed numskulls. Jesus didn’t seem to be at all concerned with
making the offer of being a disciple sound attractive. He didn’t dress it up with hip music and fancy
coffee.
I have a hard time calling him evangelical – if evangelical
means going out and doing everything to can to convince people to come join
your church. Yes, he thought all were
called. I suspect he even would have
liked to see a large band of disciples.
But his method of invitation was not going to land him a job at a mega
church.
This is a harsh passage.
Yes, it contains that wonderful verse about how all the hairs on our
heads are counted by God, but surely the sweetness of that gets swallowed up by
the severity of what Jesus is saying.
This chapter in Matthew begins with Jesus giving disciples the
authority to do everything he does:
The author writes, “Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave
them the authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every
disease and every sickness.”
This is followed by the verses immediately preceding ours where
Jesus sends them out – he gives them their job description. And I don’t think this would be a winner on
Wall Street:
“Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out
demons. You received without payment; give without payment. 9Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, 10no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff.”
And then there’s my favorite:
“I’m sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves…and you will be
hated by all.”
That’s the lead up to our passage. In other words we are in the midst of Jesus
giving instructions on what it looks like to be a disciple and nothing in those
verses makes it seem very attractive.
And our passage doesn’t help. In
fact, he pretty much ups the ante. Not
only will you be hated by all, you might lose your family, and, to put it
very bluntly, you might die.
What was Jesus doing? Weeding out the faint of heart? Was he making a prediction about their future
– that they would die at the hands of those who oppose this ministry? Was he trying to motivate them (if so, remind
me to not hire Jesus as a motivational speaker any time soon)?
The truth is I don’t think it’s really any of these, and at the
same time I think it’s a little bit of all of these. Because remember that this is Matthew writing
a gospel to be heard by the Christian community of his day. I think Matthew is
challenging his contemporaries – and he’s giving them a realistic picture of
what they can expect…And I do think he was, in a sense, motivating them.
I’m guessing the early followers of Jesus were a bit
beleaguered. It wasn’t easy being Christian
– especially given they were a persecuted minority. The Roman authorities were no more
sympathetic to the message of Jesus at that time than they were when they
nailed him to a cross.
Matthew, by putting these words in Jesus’ mouth was, I think,
reminding them that they were fighting the good fight. He was reminding them of the purpose of what
they were doing…connecting their lives directly to the resurrected one.
Jesus
says, though we wish he didn’t, I came not to bring peace to the earth, but a
sword. I so dislike this verse – in fact
I spent a fair amount of time looking at the Greek words hoping it didn’t mean
what it seems like it means.
Unfortunately, I found that our English translators low-balled it. It really says something like, “I came not to
cast peace, but to cast swords – scatter them without caring where they fall.” Bringing swords is bad enough, but casting
them about…throwing them around…blanketing the world with them, these are not
words I want to hear coming from Jesus’ mouth.
The
sword, of course, is metaphorical. It
indicates that Jesus’ presence, his message, his actions will be welcomed by
some and seen as threatening by others.
Jesus’ life was not benign. He didn’t
try to please everyone. In order to free
the oppressed, he challenged those in authority – in order to lift those in
poverty, he called out those who claimed to love God but hurt the poor and
ailing. He had incredibly high
expectations. Jesus was not benign, and
responses to him were rarely neutral.
The
point is – it’s hard to be a disciple.
And not just hard, it is scary. And
when things are hard, scary, when you are threatened, persecuted, ridiculed…any
of those things…you start to question whether you have made a mistake. As one of my bosses said to me a long time
ago, “You may see the sky as green, but if everyone else is calling it blue you
might want to reevaluate your opinion.”
I
remember when I was in my last year of college.
I was an RA in one of the biggest dorms on campus. In talking to another RA I learned that the
men on his floor were, as he put it, “playing a game.” The way it worked was that when you had sex
with a woman, you got one point for every pound she weighed. When he told me, I was appalled. In fact, I assumed he was appalled. I assumed he was telling me so we could talk
about how to address it. I was wrong.
I
went to our boss and told her about what was going on. She asked me, “What do you want me to do
about it?” I said, at the very least,
let’s sit these boys down in a room and tell them how wrong this is. The more I tried to get people to respond,
the more I was seen as an over-reactive, moralistic do-gooder by everyone
else. People begged me to let it drop. “The women don’t know they are part of a
game,” they would tell me.
I
thought the other female RAs would see things the way I did, but they were good
friends with the RA on that floor and they didn’t want to loose him as a
friend. I can tell you I lost good
friends. I felt humiliated and isolated. I began to question whether I was overreacting. Finally, to my disgrace, I just let it
go.
This
was relatively minor compared to what Jesus was asking of his disciples. He was asking them to go up against the
Romans. I was confronting 20-year-old
RAs. Certainly my life was not in
danger…which makes it all the worse. If
I failed when the stakes were relatively low, how can I ever hope to be a
disciple when the risk is death?
I can
imagine the people in Matthew’s day were wondering if it really made sense to
follow Jesus. What reward were they
getting? People were ridiculing them,
persecuting them. They must have known
that the original apostles were all martyred. They had to be wondering if they’d made a big
mistake…if they had thrown their lot in with a crazy man from Galilee.
This Jesus that Matthew presents makes it clear that being a disciple will, in fact, bring divisions. It will likely invite humiliation. You will be hated. That is what happened to Jesus, Matthew reminds them.
I’ve
spent the last week wondering whether discipleship was an all or nothing kind
of thing, or if we could take baby steps towards being a follower of
Jesus. We generally live as if it’s the
latter. And we are content with our
steps much of the time. But I think we
stop in our tracks as soon as we get any pushback from other people. I think we tend to slow down when things get
hard, or conflicted, or our friends start to question us or dislike us, or our
lifestyle starts to change.
Now,
I stand here as a full-fledged baby stepper, and I honestly think as human
beings we are probably always taking baby steps – certainly a few steps forward
and a couple steps back. But Jesus did
not seem to take baby steps. The one we
follow went where he believed he needed to go, did what he believed he needed
to do, and endured the ridicule of others, false accusations, betrayal by his
friends, and ultimately torture and death.
It was a radical life, and so our lives should probably be at least a
little bit radical. Jesus says in order
to gain your life – meaning your life as God intends, you must lose your life –
meaning your life as it is. That’s not a
baby step. It’s an exchange.
Sometimes we ask, “What is the measure of a Christian life?” And I wonder if the measure of a Christian
life is how much we are angering powerful people, or how much we are being
ridiculed, even hated, for our beliefs.
I wonder if the measure is how different our lives look than our neighbors’. These are not the measures I want. I want the measure to be how many people say,
“What an amazing Christian she is…she’s so nice to everyone and takes such good
care of her lawn.” (which I don’t, actually)
When Jesus sends his disciples out, he knows that healing the
outcast, welcoming the despised, preaching the Good news that we don’t have to
give our allegiance to earthly governments will draw ire. He doesn’t suggest that it might. He knows it will. There is something about the kingdom of God
that is antithetical to the kingdoms of this world. Not just different, but antithetical.
Three times Jesus tells the disciples to not be afraid. I’m going to take that as an indication that
the disciples – in both Jesus and Matthew’s days – were afraid. We probably are as well – afraid to jump in
all the way. Afraid to press on when it
gets difficult. And why would we? Why would we choose the life Jesus
describes?! That’s crazy. I am certainly no glutton for punishment.
Well, our lives are not just our own. We have been created by the God who champions
the underdog. When we turn our backs we
give up our true life. We also give up
our freedom – we become beholden to, ensnared in, the systems of
destruction. And that, as Jesus points
out, destroys not only those who are suffering, it destroys our souls.
If we want them back, if we want true life, if we want to help
heal this broken world, then we have to throw our lot in with the crazy man
from Galilee…regardless of the cost. Amen.
