This is one of those difficult gospel readings that has a way of catching us by surprise here on a quiet summer weekend, when out of nowhere, probably when we are hoping for some lighter content, we hear from a frustrated Jesus that we barely recognize. Jesus is clearly upset today that people around him are not hearing what he is really saying, maybe even his closest disciples don’t get it, he is telling them that his message is stronger medicine than everyone seems to think. And as a result we get Jesus saying some things that just don’t fit with the way we like to picture him. The man we call the Prince of Peace is here saying sometimes peace isn’t good, and the man who came to bring about a complete unity of the human family, no more Jew or Greek, no more male or female, here he is telling us that we should expect that the path to that unity is going to be filled with division, and that families can even come apart over what it means to follow him.
Now it’s hard to stand up here and preach a homily with some good things to say in favor of division, and that’s not what you’re getting. And don’t worry, this is going to be short in any case. But saying division is a good thing isn’t really what Jesus is after here. What he is saying is that maintaining peace in the family and keeping everyone happy with us isn’t the highest priority in our lives trying to be Christians. It’s very possible that Jesus is speaking from experience here, since he saw this same division in his own family. You might remember that very early in his public ministry, his relatives from back home expressed the strong opinion that he had gone off the rails in some major way.
Let’s look at where we are in this moment in the gospel today when Jesus just seems to boil over with this message about how he can be a source of discord and disagreement. Because all along up until this point, the tension and even resistance to Jesus has been gradually building in the gospel. We sometimes imagine that Jesus’s public ministry was a time of constant growth and acceptance, with surging crowds attracted to his message of unconditional love. But it wasn’t that way. Jesus’s message could be jarring and offputting for people as well as attractive.
Because what he was preaching was how to live in a different kingdom where different rules apply, putting the poor and forgotten first instead of blaming them or fearing them, giving priority to the people the rest of the world might even think are part of the problem, being generous even to the point of foolishness, making love more important than just outwardly conforming to what your religion asks of you. This kingdom of heaven on earth that Jesus wants is a world with its priorities turned upside down, and sometimes people listened to him, as we still do, and we all say, how can people possibly live that way? How is it possible to be that generous with total strangers? How can you forgive that much? How can you care for others without judging them? Living that way is hard to do, and yes, it also causes conflicts with the way a lot of other people live their lives.
And yet, Jesus was hoping that people would understand that trying to live as if you were in that kingdom is liberation for all of us. It frees us from the rules of this world and offers us real freedom instead. It’s also liberation for a church, because a church living according to the rules of Jesus’s kingdom, this is the kind of church people are looking for and wanting to see, the one they’re expecting us to be. But liberation like this isn’t easy. You leave behind things, a former way of life, maybe even some expectations or opinions of the people around you. And you’ll look at the signs of the times, as Jesus says here we are supposed to, and you’ll decide that now, really, you could end up doing something that won’t make everyone you know entirely happy.
So despite what Jesus said once about his yoke being easy and the burden light, it’s only light once you decide that yes, you’re going to put that yoke on and see where it takes you. A great Orthodox Christian leader who died this past week said that Christians ought to live in a way that even if you completely lost the gospels, you could figure out how to rewrite them based on the way Christians were living. Our faith isn’t just a private matter, it is supposed to be something that people see and react to, positively or maybe sometimes negatively, their reaction isn’t the thing that matters. It’s the fire that Jesus says today he wants to see, a fire that doesn’t just burn things down, it builds something completely new.