These are not easy words to read, let alone preach. Not only are the demands of discipleship downright demanding (the ability to raise the dead, exorcise demons, cure leprosy, and embrace extreme poverty), but this week, the Prince of Peace’s rhetoric has suddenly turned violent. This Jesus makes me nervous. He’s different, not himself. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” For a man who has preached from Isaiah in synagogues across Galilee, has he forgotten the opening words of the scroll “And they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning knives. (Isaiah 2:4)? I know he knows them. What’s happened?
This passage from Matthew is driven by fear and familial strife. Thank God this wasn’t the lectionary passage for Father’s Day. What are we to do with these unsettling words? Are they the original ideas of Jesus, later interpolations by the Matthean community, or post-70 AD reflections on the destruction of the early Judeo-Christian church? They don’t sit well with the Jesus of chapter 5, the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount, the one who Blessed the Peacemakers. They don’t ring true to me. This isn’t Jesus doing the talking. Someone is speaking for Jesus, putting their words and agenda into his mouth. That’s kind of like today. We’re good at putting our words, thoughts, and ideas into Jesus’ mouth and forcing him, like a Muppet, to say what we want. Or, on the other hand, when we need to listen to Jesus, we stay silent and ignore his actual words, like the Beatitudes, and jump on these violent-sounding ruminations because they fit so well with the fear, violence, and alienation at the heart of our lives. “Yes,” we say. “See, this must be the real Jesus, the tough-talking Jesus, the Jesus who advocates carrying a weapon and is ready to tell it like it is.”
Does this sound like the Jesus you know? Does this sound like the Jesus who forgives those who crucify him? Does this sound like the Jesus who tells Peter to put his sword away when the temple guard arrests him? No, it does not. The contrast is as stark as the power imbalance visible in a Roman soldier beating an innocent Galilean fisherman. This is a later insertion, written forty-plus years after Jesus’ death, a discipleship manifesto written after the temple’s destruction when Rome’s all-encompassing occupation had turned families against each other and nearly destroyed the nascent Christian community. These words may be in the Bible but aren’t from Jesus.
We must be cautious in preaching dangerous texts about Jesus, violence, and dysfunctional families, especially during this time of cultural strife and social tension. The likelihood of being misunderstood, creating more fear, justifying familial disharmony, and promoting an image of Jesus that is simply out of context with the rest of the Gospels is too great. It’s simply too easy to stand up, open the Bible, and worsen an already deteriorating cultural and religious environment. This is the last thing we want to do on Sunday mornings. We don’t want to misrepresent Jesus, his teachings, or the Good News. Ultimately, isn’t that what this passage is about in the first place, acknowledging the honest Jesus, not some pale, late first-century version that fits our 21st-century American expectations?