Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 19, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Some of the statements that the Gospel writers attribute to Jesus just leave us shaking our heads. Some of them just don’t seem to make sense. One of those is Matthew 10:39 from our reading this morning: "Those who find their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." That doesn’t make any sense, although some day I’ll probably preach on it and try to make it make sense. If something’s lost it’s lost and if it’s found it’s found, not the other way around.

Other statements attributed to Jesus make sense, but they leave us shaking our heads anyway because they seem to contradict everything that we think we know about Jesus. Our passage this morning has one of those too, Matthew 10:34, which reads: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have come to bring not peace but a sword." Then it gets worse. Matthew’s Jesus is so far from preaching the family values that Focus on the Family and its ilk in rightwing Christianity would have us believe are the heart of our faith that he says that he has come to set family members against one another. He calls on his followers to love him more than even our parents or our children. Not peace but a sword? Children turned against parents and parents against children? What’s going on here?

Well, I think several things are going on here. The historian would say: The historical Jesus never said those words. The Gospel of Matthew was written toward the end of the first century CE, and it reflects the circumstances of one early Christian community more than it does anything that Jesus ever said as an historical matter. By the end of the first century the sword of the Roman Empire had come down, at least at times, on the Christians. Professing Jesus Christ had divided families, lots of them. We could write this passage off on these historical grounds. Jesus didn’t say it, and it’s about other people a long time ago in a place far away. Trust me. The historian in me is sorely tempted to do just that.

The problem is that the theologian in me, and the pastor in me, won’t let me do it. These words are in the Bible. They’re in one (actually in one form or another in two) of the Gospels. They are attributed to Jesus. For all of these reasons I cannot just write these words off and pretend that they aren’t there or that they have nothing to say to us. So let’s take a stab at making some sense out of them, at finding some meaning in them for us in this place today.

"I come to bring not peace but a sword." On its face this statement seems to contradict the image of Jesus as the Prince of Peace that is such a central part of our tradition. It seems to contradict the peace saying that this same Gospel also attributes to Jesus: Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you, and so on. Yet upon closer examination I don’t think that it really does contradict that image or those sayings. Bear with me now while I put on my lawyer’s hat. Don’t worry, it won’t be on for long.

There is a maxim in the law that says that if the consequences of an action are sufficiently foreseeable and certain to follow from the action, we can say that the person who intended to do the action also intended those foreseeably certain consequences. If you’re standing closer to me than the length of my arm, and I make a fist and thrust it out as hard as I can and as far as I can in the direction of your nose, the law will conclude that I intended to punch you in the nose. It won’t let me claim that all I was doing was stretching my arm, or at least it’s going to require a lot of proof before it accepts that feeble excuse for my actions.

Let’s apply this legal maxim to Jesus’ preaching the Gospel. In a world where people were judged by their station in life and by how well they conformed to the social and religious norms of the time, Jesus preached a Gospel of radical inclusion and told the rich that God always likes the poor better. He said compassion is more important than purity. He said God is a God love not of law. He said God’s way is the way of peace not of violence. He made the last first and the first last. He preferred the tax collector who prayed for God’s mercy to the righteous Pharisee, and he said that God did too. He said that it was more important to follow God than to follow the authorities of the world. In everything he said and did he turned the social and religious world of his time on its head.

He preached all of these things in a world in which powerful social and religious elites benefited greatly from the way the world was structured, from their world as it stood upright on its feet. It isn’t hard to figure out how most of that world would react to this upstart itinerant preacher and his followers standing that well-ordered world (as it seemed to them) with them at the top on its head. It was perfectly foreseeable that the powers of that world would not sit idly by and let Jesus and his followers threaten their status, wealth, and power. It was easy to see that they would react against Jesus’ message and the ones who brought it strongly and violently.

They did react against that message and the ones who brought it strongly and violently. They crucified Jesus and killed his closest and most influential followers-Stephen first, then, according to Christian legend at least, Peter and Paul, and so many others. They persecuted Jesus’ followers. The Jews expelled them from the synagogues. Nero used them as human torches to light his gardens at night, or so the story goes. Jesus did indeed bring to the earth not peace but a sword, the sword of Rome. It was clearly foreseeable that the Gospel of peace and unconditional love would bring the sword of Empire down on its followers.

So that’s how I understand the statement attributed to Jesus in Matthew 10:34: "I come to bring not peace but a sword." Jesus did not desire all the violence that came in his aftermath, but that it would come was perfectly clear. In that sense, in the legal sense of attributing intent to cause foreseeable consequences of one’s actions, Jesus did indeed come not to bring peace to the earth but a sword.

Now at this point you might well be saying: That’s all ancient history. What does that have to do with us? Well, we claim to be followers of Jesus, so it should be important to us to look at what he did with what had to be his foreknowledge of how the world would react to his message. He could have kept quiet. He could have said to himself: I know that I have a profound message from God to share with all the earth, but if I do the world will reject me. It will probably kill me. It will persecute and kill my followers. It’s not worth it. I’d best keep my mouth shut, but he didn’t say that and he didn’t do that. He spoke out, knowing the negative consequences that would follow for himself and for his most faithful followers. The world needed the message he had to give of God’s unconditional love for all people. The Gospel had to be preached, and Jesus had to preach it. He had to show the world the error of its ways. He had to preach the love of God. He had to live the love of God. He knew the consequences, but he didn’t let the consequences stop the Word of God from coming into the world.

We are called to follow Christ’s example. Our world is very different from his in many ways, but in one way it is very much the same. The world doesn’t want to hear Jesus’ Gospel today any more than it did 2,000 years ago. Not the true Gospel. Not the Gospel that says unconditional love trumps religious laws and our own self-righteous purity. Not the Gospel that says God’s way is the way of non-violence. That’s the Gospel we’re called to proclaim

And the world doesn’t want to hear it, not most of the world, not the world of the rich, privileged, and powerful. We are called to proclaim a radically counter-cultural Gospel. Christ’s Gospel is a message of God’s unconditional love for all people preached to a world addicted to hatred and judgment. Christ’s Gospel is a Gospel of peace and nonviolent resistance to evil preached to a world addicted to war and the violent resolution of conflicts. The world still rejects that Gospel. The religious establishments of this and most every other nation still reject that Gospel.

The Gospel of Christ is a sword aimed squarely at the heart of every worldly domination system, every empire, every human convention that advocates violence and the oppression of any of God’s people. That is the sword of Christ, and it brings the sword of the world down on itself every time it is preached authentically and with power. It does divide families. It does provoke violence, even violence perpetrated in the name of the Prince of Peace. Jesus didn’t intend violence, but he knew it would probably happen. He didn’t intend to set family members against one another, but he knew that that would probably happen too. We need to be aware that those things can happen here too when the true Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached. And like Jesus, we cannot let that stop us from preaching it, authentically and with power. May God grant us the courage to do it. Amen.