What does it really mean that Jesus comes with a sword to bring division? We first need to realize we’re looking at our own world wrong.
Jesus and the sword of division
Proper 7A | Matthew 10:24-39
I bet you know how these disciples feel. Not exactly, of course. But that sensation. The preacher is right here, telling you stuff about division, hardship, suffering…the stuff you really don’t want to hear.
The preacher is saying that you are to go out, like sheep in the midst of wolves. Suffering, pain, division in our own families over this! Over faith! Aren’t we supposed to love each other?!
Then the preacher keeps going!
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
And
“For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”
This doesn’t sound like the Prince of Peace but the God of War.
And I bet you know that feeling—hearing hard words preached, confusing thoughts offered about the nature of God. We are being asked to face a vision of God and the world we don’t want to face. And that is the reason we must.
First of all, that line.
When we hear Jesus say he doesn’t come to bring peace, we all have cognitive dissonance. That phrase doesn’t compute with us. We know he is the Prince of Peace, so when it sounds like he’s telling us he’s not, our brains lock up. They produce an error screen.
So two things are happening.
- We are getting a single statement that contradicts the abundance of proof that he is for peace.
- We hear the words with literal force more than rhetorical force.
And we take these two things and we filter them through a judgment that is not from the text, but from our cultural belief: that division itself is wrong. So there’s something more. Something behind this really challenging word for them—and for us.
Remember that peace is about wholeness.
One of the challenges for us is that we need peace to come through peace because we know that true peace never comes through war. We can’t fight our way to peace. We can’t oppress others enough to get to peace.
But God’s vision of peace is not simply the absence of war.
Peace, Shalom, is about wholeness. So it includes health, well-being, justice, inclusion, support, conciliation between all the parties. Peace is about the presence of restored grace.
So when Jesus says he doesn’t come to bring peace, but a sword; to divide families and split those who need to be reconciled, why would he be saying this if it is aberrant to the character of God’s peace?
There are two options. Either Jesus is wrong about what God wants for the world…or we are.
So maybe it’s time for us to take a step back from what we want from this passage. Maybe we should look at what Jesus wants.
Jesus is quoting Micah.
Micah was a prophet from Judah during the 8th Century BCE. He was present during the fall of Israel. This is a time when the Hebrew people were bitterly divided and under threat of imperialistic empires. Families were certainly divided. It was a dark time and existential threats were real.
So when Jesus looks to a prophet who is describing the bitter divisions, infighting, and frustrations of rival factions, he’s calling his followers back to their own history. As a preacher, he’s reminding his people that their people have faced this before, their tradition knows a thing or two about arguments and broken relationships.
The world the prophet describes in chapter 7 of Micah is not political division, but an utter departure from God’s purpose:
“The faithful have disappeared from the land,
and there is no one left who is upright;
they all lie in wait for blood,
and they hunt each other with nets.”
And all trust in the institutions and systems is gone:
“The best of them is like a brier,
the most upright of them a thorn hedge.
The day of their sentinels, of their punishment, has come;
now their confusion is at hand.
Put no trust in a friend,
have no confidence in a loved one;
guard the doors of your mouth
from her who lies in your embrace;”
There is nowhere on earth to turn. Therefore, the direction Micah goes in verse 7 makes all the sense in the world:
“But as for me, I will look to the Lord,
I will wait for the God of my salvation;
my God will hear me.”
Any of this sound familiar?
The challenge Jesus gives his followers including us is that he preaches a sermon we don’t want to hear about a subject we don’t want to hear about in a way that only kind of makes sense to us. And the best analogy I can come up with is from baseball.
We’re sitting on a belt-high fastball and he’s locking us up with curveball at our knees.
But all of their context is our context. We aren’t divided because we have different opinions. Trust is so broken that we are essentially lawless.
The levels we will go to undermine and manipulate are breathtaking. This isn’t about businesses burning alone; this is also the five black men lynched in trees in this country this week; and all ruled suicides.
It is the way we paint everything in the evangelical frame of a culture war—two sides locked into mortal combat.
This is the stuck feeling of it all; the sense that we can’t trust our neighbors, the news, or any public figure to be honest. To have the community’s best interest at heart. We expect only selfish greed.
This, my friends, is not division. For there are never only two sides. This is chaos.
And Jesus sounds the trumpet.
From the midst of chaos, his followers hear it and look up.
This way. All others lead to death. This is the way to life.
It seems to me that the division Jesus brings is clarity. It is not our picture of eternal dualism, in which there are always two sides. Jesus isn’t pushing people apart for the sake of animosity.
He is cleaving the chaos and dividing what is true from what is distortion. Jesus brings awareness of God’s law in the midst of this human lawlessness.
This is the same spirit in which he heals on the Sabbath and humiliates the hypocritical leaders in front of a crowd. Jesus pushes the boundaries of public decency to preach about the true reconciling beauty of God’s grace. The grace of the kin-dom, not an empire.
And if any remain in the chaos it is because they prefer it to grace. Because receiving grace requires admitting you need it.
Listening For Jesus
Friends, our diocese is committed to listening for Jesus in our communities. It has long struggled, not only with the racism that is present in the cities of this diocese, but in the church. We have struggled to hear Jesus’s guidance toward conciliating the sins of our institution’s past and present with God’s dream for our world. And few sins continue to scar us like racism.
Last week, I reminded us of the sin of our local past. Perhaps some have wondered if any of our predecessors at St. Stephen’s participated in the lynching of George Ward 119 years ago. Perhaps even one of the names commemorated in a window. Maybe our 7th Street neighbors were there. Maybe they took pictures and kept souvenirs—the grotesque tokens that often accompany such inhuman acts.
At our convention last year, Kelly Brown Douglas reminded us of the racism enshrined in the episcopate—how we created separate-and-unequal bishops to serve our separate-and-unequal churches.
In the midst of what may seem like chaos in our country, our diocese continues to listen for Jesus. Not to flee from anxiety, but for guidance in hope. We continue to see racial reconciliation as a most pressing need, but not primarily to end the chaos, but to make peace.
Make Peace
To bring wholeness where there is separation, reconciliation where there is strife, wellness where there is sickness, hope where there is despair, and justice where there is injustice.
This is the work of the church. That’s why Jesus can give such a spicy message, saying
“whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
Because the power is in our hands. The power to make peace. Shalom. The Kin-dom. The very dream of God for all of this very good creation.
We have that power when we follow him.