There’s a real temptation to approach this as a “some sayings of Jesus” text—as a disjointed and seemingly disconnected collection of things that distract. So the implication, then, is to pick one part and run with it.
At the same time, there is no question that the text itself is deeply troubling and confusing. You could try to preach about the part about Jesus being maligned. The whole thing about Beelzebul. Maybe do a word study and go off on that tangent.
But we all know that’s avoiding the elephant in the room. A shouting, belligerent elephant that is scaring the children.
The division talk is unavoidable.
You can try, but don’t. Better to confront it honestly. Especially given that Jesus seems to be talking about confronting our demons honestly.
There are really two conflicts happening at once here. And I think this is what causes so much of the confusion. It’s like they have an exponential effect when paired together.
And this confusion is based in the fact that we really expect to take Jesus directly. And doing so here gets filtered in our brains as the direct opposite of what he preached before. So—
- We don’t know what to do with the seeming conflict within Jesus’s teachings.
- We genuinely don’t follow what Jesus is saying about division.
And this is further complicated by the fact that we all know division. We all loathe division. And we are not at all on the same page about how to avoid division.
So, in a sense, the reason we’re freaked out by Jesus here is not merely that we don’t entirely get what he’s doing (we don’t). But also because we don’t really want to get it.
Unmasking our bias.
We have a societal bias against someone “starting” conflict. So when we read this, we hear Jesus say that he’s coming to start something. And
starting something = bad
So…no thanks, Jesus!
But this is also why we struggle to get to the root of what Jesus is saying. Because we often define receiving oppression as “deserved” and starting something.
Just go on social media when a person who has caused great suffering in the world dies. People go: “Karma”.
The hard truth about division
When Jesus enters in by bringing a sword, we assume one of two things:
- aggressor
- defender
and the sword acts as a weapon in a literal combat.
Or
We think of it as a means of cleaving us in two.
This latter is the right one. But we still enter into that thinking that he is being the aggressor in a different kind of violent combat: the dividing of people. Rather than what they call in family systems theory: self-differentiation.
What Jesus is doing is not initiating division, but unmasking abuse, separating the vulnerable, and empowering those who would bear witness to Christ.
Every last conversation I have had about division between people has been predicated on the bias of determining who “started it.” But Jesus isn’t particularly concerned with division here. We are!
He isn’t starting something, ending something, abetting or encouraging it.
What Jesus showed concern for in the surrounding text is healing the sick and liberating the captive. He brings freedom to the oppressed and joy to the sorrowful.
We’re the ones who think what he’s doing is divisive. In part because we refrain from calling oppression divisive.
Preaching on division codes as divisive.
In our world of not wanting to start something or defining all attempts to solve our common problems as needing to determine who, in fact, “started it,” bringing up the truth gets coded as divisive.
Talk about race? Divisive. Poverty? Divisive. Objectionable acts of governments? Divisive.
What we struggle to notice, of course, is that refusing to talk doesn’t eliminate the problem. Ignoring the leak in the roof doesn’t prevent the rain from getting in. Not dealing with the world because its divisive doesn’t prevent division. Nor should we be treated like we’ve started anything.
Notice that Jesus didn’t create the separation between the people and the religious leaders. He named the division that the religious leaders created. If he’s the author of division, then it sure is weird to consider healing the oppressed as that problematic.
This is why it is hard to preach on this text. Not because it actually is hard to understand (it isn’t). But because we are afraid of dealing with the truth it responds to. We’re afraid to be ostracized for speaking the truth about division, oppression, and our cultural biases around conflict.
And because it is hard to help people genuinely deprogram themselves from a brutal, divisive worldview our culture engenders in us. Anyone who has studied family-systems theory or human psychology can get to the root of it rather quickly. But explaining these things in ten minutes? Not so easy.
Do it anyway.