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| Yeah, this is not the Jesus we hear about in Sunday School |
Luke 12:49-56
Grace, peace and mercy
are yours, from the Triune God. Amen
Wow. The Jesus we hear about in today’s Gospel is
most definitely NOT the gentle Jesus we see depicted holding lambs and greeting
children in frames on Sunday School classroom walls. This is Jesus on a mission, with a
singleness of purpose, who has “set his face towards Jerusalem.” In the first part of today’s Gospel we hear
Jesus describing this mission to his disciples.
There is a decided tone of exasperation,
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how
I wish it were already kindled! I have a
baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is
completed!”
And it gets even more unnerving,
“Do you think that I have come to bring
peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but
rather division!”
He goes on to describe how
households and families will be divided.
So if we take this text at face value, we hear about a Jesus who appears
to be downright stressed out, ready to light a massive fire to consume the
earth, has no desire whatsoever to bring peace, but instead has made it his
personal mission to divide families…and this is not really a Jesus that I have
a desire to know or spend much time with. And it seems to be in direct
opposition to the Jesus that we hear about elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel.
We hear readings
in Advent from the first chapter of Luke when the birth of Jesus is foretold by
Zechariah when he says that Jesus will “guide our feet in the way of
peace.” On Christmas, we hear the story
of how the angels heralded the birth of Jesus saying, “Glory to God in the
highest heaven, and on earth, peace among those whom he favors.” Throughout the rest of the year, we hear
stories of Jesus healing the sick, casting out demons, and keeping company with
sinners. Along the way he scolds his
disciples or would-be followers for having slightly skewed priorities, like
Martha cleaning the kitchen instead of listening to Jesus like her sister Mary,
or when the disciples argue about petty things among themselves such as who is the
greatest. But overall, the Jesus in
Luke’s Gospel up to this point appears to be a pretty nice guy. So what in the WORLD is going ON in today’s
Gospel?!
Do we really even
know Jesus? His birth was supposed to
bring peace to all the earth. Jesus was
supposed to bring people together. It does not sit so well when we hear him
saying that he came to divide father against son and mother against daughter. This
claim causes a sort of existential dread when we re-live all the times we were
cut off from our loved ones. When we
entered into a relationship with someone that our families did not like. When the cherished son came out as gay to
conservative parents. When the daughter
who always seemed to have it together succumbs to the ravages of alcoholism. When we need to sever ties with our families
of origin because of abuse. These
divisions hurt. We do not like this idea of Jesus bringing division because we
are importing our own sense of who is in and who is out and we have all been on
the painful side of human divisions before. Whether rich or poor, old or young,
liberal or conservative, gay or straight, and so on.
We react to texts
like these because we know what it feels like to have others claim God for
their own purposes, such as Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, or Pat
Robertson explaining natural disasters as God seeking revenge. Or those who say the election of a certain
politician was “God’s will.” If our
human brokenness causes so much division already, why would we want to have a
God who causes an even deeper rift?
But what if Jesus is not actually making
divisions between people and in families at all?
The household that Jesus describes
in today’s Gospel is not what we imagine.
When we hear the word “household” we think about parents and children
neatly ensconced in a four-bedroom house on a quiet tree-lined street. But in first century Jerusalem, a household
was the primary form of social organization and served as a microcosm for all
of the social order. It provided space
for raising children, but also provided for maintaining a certain system of
power and privilege that ensured that some people would always remain on the
margins, such as the slaves who served that household.
When Jesus asserts
that he comes to bring division, he is boldly stating that he has not come to
validate human structures of who is in and who is out, who has power and who is
powerless, but rather, to initiate God’s radical will. The harsh sayings in this text remind us that
Jesus has not come to validate the divisions we have set up. Jesus has not come to perpetuate the status
quo! This is not business as usual. The
Jesus that we hear about in today’s Gospel, as he is making his way ever closer
to Jerusalem and to the cross, only has an agenda of compassion, mercy, and
justice. When Jesus appears exasperated and angry in today’s text, he is naming
the tension between the vision that God wants to see for all of creation and
what is actually happening now in the old creation.
And this baptism
that Jesus refers to is not one with water in the Jordan River. No, this
baptism refers to his own death! Baptism
is not merely a cozy ceremony in which we welcome children or adults into a
congregation, it represents the dying, the drowning, of the old self and
through this dying, explains how we share in the resurrection of Christ and
become a new creation. Jesus is an apocalyptic prophet who is pointing with his
own outstretched arms on a cross to a new future. We get nervous about things that sound
judgmental because we are afraid that we will be judged to be on the wrong side. But what is actually revealed here is God’s
own passion for justice for all people.
This is not an angry God who delights in dividing families; this is a
passionate God who wants the whole world to be redeemed through radical love.
The last portion
of today’s Gospel has Jesus admonishing the crowds, “You know how to interpret
the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the
present time?” He is chastising them for
their inability to see the divine activity happening in their midst. The people miss his message all the way up
until his death on a cross. We need to
see God in Christ as seen on the cross because we cannot always see him walking
beside us.
Jesus came to
testify to the in-breaking of God to do a new thing in all the earth. Over and over in Luke’s Gospel we hear about
the reversals of social order. Jesus is
disruptive. The Kingdom of God is
disruptive. This is not going to feel
like good news if we feel safe and secure in our present location. But for those imprisoned by circumstance,
this disruption comes as the best news possible. Jesus makes it clear that he is unabashedly
for the weak, lowly, broken, poor, and sick.
And furthermore, this is all of us in one way or another. But human systems of power do not favor those
on the margins. We do not value our
elders in the way they deserve. We
dismiss the ideas and energy of our young people. We let skin color or ethnicity or disability
get in the way of real relationships. We
let money make our decisions for us and put it between ourselves and our
neighbors in need.
Jesus came into the world to
disrupt all of this.
In today’s Gospel Jesus
is upending the social structure that humanity clings to in order to put its
trust in something…in anything…and instead have us turn towards a loving God. Jesus has not come to validate the divisions
we make for ourselves, rather, he has come to destroy them and show the deep
and abiding love of a God who wants to redeem the whole world. The division is between old and new creation. The old creation where we are sinful, broken,
oppressed and oppressing and the new creation where we are redeemed, freed and
loved. God is jolting all of us out of
the places where we have gotten too comfortable. God is pulling us through the waters of
baptism and into new life.
But for all of
this talk of division and destruction of the old and the rising of the new, we
are still both sinner and saint in the same broken body. The Kingdom of God is now and not yet. Jesus came to divide us from our old selves
and the old creation, and while we arise as a new creation each day in the
image of the risen Christ, we live in the tension of both/and, now and not
yet. And we eagerly anticipate God’s
future in which this division will be no more.
Amen.
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