Bible reading: Matthew 10:26-39.

Message.

I’d guess that most of us would think of Jesus as a peace-loving person, and the Gospels seem to bear this out. For instance, in the Sermon on the Mount, he commends peace-makers, saying that they will be known as God’s children. In the same sermon he tells his followers not to take revenge on someone who wrongs them; if they are slapped on one cheek, they should turn round so they can be slapped on the other one as well. Jesus also calls on his hearers to replace the old adage, “Love your friends and hate your enemies” with, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”.

But Jesus isn’t just peaceable in his teaching. When he meets up with disciples he almost invariably begins by saying, “Peace be with you”; and, when the disciples are sent out on their mission to the towns and villages, they are to pronounce peace on every house they enter. We can also think of Palm Sunday, when Jesus enters the city in a parody of a military parade; and of the dramatic night of his arrest: when the disciples see Judas leading a mob armed with swords and clubs they ask him, “Shall we use our swords, Lord?” Although Jesus says, “No”, Peter is too hasty and slices off a man’s ear which Jesus immediately and miraculously restores.

Later, after the Resurrection, it becomes clear that disciples such as Simon the Zealot, who had hoped that Jesus would lead a rebellion against Rome to end its occupation of Judaea, are disappointed in his refusal to take up arms. Right to the end of his time on earth, Jesus’s words and actions seem to fit his title of “Prince of peace”. The only events which jar a bit are the bizarre story of him sending the herd of pigs careering into the lake to drown, and his angry rampage through the Temple, upsetting market stalls and causing mayhem. Even then, no-one got hurt.

So, if we have this picture of a peaceful Jesus in our minds, we’re brought up short by his words in today’s reading: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” – did you notice how Jesus, just to make sure that we are listening, underlines the words, “I have not come to bring peace”? These sentences seem totally out of character, in fact they startle and hock us. So what must we do with them? Do we suggest that Matthew wrote them down wrongly, or say that Jesus spoke harshly because he was having a bad day; or do we simply ignore them as “too difficult”? The fact that these words are included in more than one Gospel means that we have to take them seriously, we have no choice.

Before I attempt to do that, I’d like to talk about the actual word “sword” that Jesus uses. You might say that a sword comes in all shapes and sizes; that’s true, but different kinds of swords have different names – any fencing coach would tell you that. And the word used here is not the one used for the Roman soldier’s military broadsword, a large, heavy and lethal weapon. It might better be translated as “dagger” – a razor-sharp short sword with a blade of bronze or iron and a handle of wood or bone. The sword would have been used for cutting and stabbing in close-range fighting and was kept in a sheath for safety. This weapon wasn’t clearly one you’d want to be attacked with, it speaks of death-dealing hostility, aggression, authority and power. Yet Jesus said that he came to bring it, rather than peace. How strange.

There have certainly been many occasions when Christians have been urged to take up weapons for what, they are told, is a worthy cause. Think, for instance, of the Crusades in the Middle Ages, which have been called “Christendom’s first Jihad”. People regarded a crusade to recapture territory lost by Christians to so-called Muslim infidels as an endeavour authorised by Christ himself through his mouthpiece, the Pope. Those who took part were told not only that they were fighting in a “just” cause but in a war which was necessary and holy in the eyes of God. The Catholic Church often required soldiers who killed in ordinary European wars to do penance afterwards, but taking part in a crusade was different as it cleansed a man from prior sin and guaranteed his admission to heaven – or so it was claimed.

Well, you might say, the Crusades took place many centuries ago; so they did, but their memory has soured Christian-Muslim relations ever since, and also given ammunition to folk who like to say that religion has been the chief cause of wars throughout history. Sadly there have been more recent examples of Christian leaders speaking in very similar terms to those medieval popes. Probably the most notorious was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London, who was a fervent supporter of the First World War. In an infamous sermon preached in 1915 he said, “To save the freedom of the world, to save Liberty’s own self, to save the honour of men and women and the innocence of children, everything that is noblest in Europe, everyone that puts principle above ease, and life itself beyond mere living, are banded in a great crusade … to kill Germans: to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world” (I won’t go on as it gets worse). Equally, the bishop wrote this in a recruiting article for “The Times”: “I look upon every man who fights in this war for this cause as a hero, and if he dies in it, as a martyr. It will be a lifelong regret to every Briton if he has not done … his utmost in this day of God”.

I am horrified by these sentiments; but they passed almost unnoticed and without criticism at the time. And there are still people who base their hate and violence on Jesus. Hear what Paul Golding, formerly a local councillor for the British National Party and a leader of the far-right “Britain First” group, had to say: “People think of Jesus as some tree-hugging, sandal-wearing liberal, which isn’t the case. He used physical violence at times, like in the temple in Jerusalem, when he physically attacked people who were trading in the temple grounds, and it says in the Bible he came to bring a sword, not to bring peace”. There are those awkward words again; and, if we don’t agree they give us the right to take up arms and fight in Jesus’s name (which we most certainly don’t), then we must say what we believe they do mean. That meaning must surely flow from the context in which the words are set.

As it happens, that context is a bit confusing; I rather suspect that Matthew has stuck together several statements of Jesus which were originally separate. For the first part of the chapter is about Jesus commissioning his disciples for a short-term tour around the towns and villages, preaching and healing. Some people will welcome them but others will not. The chapter then takes a darker tone as it seems to be jumping into prophecies of much more difficult times for Jesus’s followers, even the final days before his return to earth. Christians, it says, will be persecuted and brought to trial; they will be hated by everyone and may have to run to places of safety if they are not to be slaughtered. However, says Jesus, those who hold out to the end will be saved. Does that really encourage us? I’m not sure.

And, towards the end of his discourse, Jesus gets down to something very specific: the way that Christian discipleship can divide families. He says, “I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law. Your worst enemies will be the members of your own family”. And he rounds things off with an excruciating challenge: “Those who love their father or mother more than me are not fit to be my disciples; those who love their son or daughter more than me are not fit to be my disciples”. Do we really have to make such an impossible choice?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Well, the answer in modern British society is probably, “No”. Our family may think that we are a bit in choosing to follow a Christian path; and there may be times when we have to say, “I’m sorry, as a follower of Jesus I don’t feel in can join in with the activity you are planning” – either because we feel it is simply inappropriate or wrong, or because it clashes with a commitment we’ve made to Christian service. The saying, “Family always comes first” is not one that Jesus would agree with – after all, didn’t he once say that the people who were listening to him were his mother and brothers and sisters, rather than his kith and kin who were trying to call him away? Jesus draws – or should we say “cuts”? – a line through our households, a line that’s defined by where people stand in their relationship with him.

As I say, this is unlikely to be more than a talking-point or a minor issue in most families, although it can lead to difficult arguments. But someone’s decision to follow Jesus can cause real division, exclusion and even death-threats in some communities where religion is tightly tied to clan loyalty or ethnic identity; huge difficulties can arise if, for instance, someone from a strict Muslim or orthodox Jewish family says that they want to become a Christian. This isn’t seen simply as a desire to change one’s faith; it’s regarded as a rejection of one’s heritage, a dishonourable act which brings shame on the whole family. That is when Jesus brings not peace, but a metaphorical sword of division.

I’m nearly done, but I do want to include one final thought. For Jesus’s words bring to mind another Bible verse: the one which says, “God’s word is alive and active; it is sharper than any double-edged sword and penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart”. Although this verse refers to God’s utterances in the Old Testament, we mustn’t forget that Jesus is God’s living Word – as in that famous opening to John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word”. I think it is therefore fair to say that Jesus and his teaching can also have this divisive effect; as a Catholic writer has put it, “Our faith is divisive because it is true. It demands that we make a choice”. Making that choice can be costly.

It’s pure coincidence that the Lectionary has set us this difficult passage to think about on Fathers’ Day. Indeed, it seems to demolish rather than support family life – which, as we all know, isn’t easy to sustain even at the best of times. But perhaps it is in fact uncannily apposite, as it asks us to think very seriously about where our priorities lie and, indeed, who we consider to be our “best” father. At the start of our service we prayed, “Our Father, who art in heaven”. At the end of the day, is he the father we love, respect and serve above all others? That’s the decision Jesus asks us to make.