The heart of this week’s gospel is Peter’s desire for clarity. But Jesus reveals that Peter wanted something else.
For Sunday
Proper 15C
Collect
Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Luke 12:49-56
“You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
Reflection
This is an intense passage from the gospel of Luke, full of frustration and talk of division. It is the kind of passage that frightens us more than anything. Most of all, I think, we want to understand why he’s saying this.
If we go and flip through the rest of chapter 12, we can see that Jesus is guiding them in a particular direction: to see the evil and injustice in the world and to feel the urgency to challenge it now.
We got a piece of this two weeks ago and then again last week.
The lectionary skipped over an important element in the story, however.
Right after we read about Jesus teaching about urgency in a parable, Peter asks him if this teaching is for the disciples specifically or is it for everyone? This seems like a pretty fair question, doesn’t it? He’s looking for a bit of clarity. Wants to know the parameters of it all.
That’s when Jesus launches into a dark parable that flows into this talk of division within families we get this week.
It seems important that Jesus goes into this talk in response to the attempt to clarify. In a sense, it tells us that because they didn’t fully understand what Jesus was saying, Jesus sensed that he needed to teach them more. Rather than offer a prescription for how the world works, Jesus is trying to teach them how to approach their world.
But he also says that they should know this already. Because the signs are there. We are staring at them and pretending we can’t interpret them. In seeking clarity, Jesus seems to be saying that Peter is avoiding the urgency. It’s a delay tactic. If you can look at X and Y with the weather and predict Z, why act so helpless when talking about people?
Most of us would just say that people are complicated. Sure. But we’re also not talking about rocket science.
Jesus was just talking to them about injustice, hypocrisy, and oppression. He warned them of their leaders, the wealthy, and those professionals who keep the people in a kind of underclass. It’s pretty obvious that this is a message that divides.
From the outside, the abstract idea of division is wrong. But from a community already politically divided into haves and have-nots, clarity reveals division. That is precisely what Jesus was offering his disciples. It just revealed stuff Peter didn’t like.