9th Sunday after Trinity, 2025. Year C.
Preached at St Barnabas, Pitshanger Lane.
Readings – Jeremiah23:23-29; Hebrews 11:29-12:2 & Luke 12:49-56.
Our reading from Luke might strike us as being unusual language from Jesus, and yet this episode appears in all of the synoptic gospels. Jesus is making an emphatic point about the necessity of remaining alert and expectant for events that are to come.
In doing so he uses the apocalyptic language that we also find in the Old Testament used by the prophets, especially when they are warning of the fate that will befall Israel as a result of its unfaithfulness towards God – a fate realised in the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple.
It can at first feel jarring when we encounter passages like this, which seem at odds with Jesus’ normally more measured way of speaking, and with his emphasis on love and peace as the key to the Kingdom, rather than violence and division.
But he is speaking here with a purpose, because he is trying to shock his audience out of their assumptions about what they think is God’s eschatological plan. He knows that their wish for a military messiah who will confront the hated Romans is a route that will lead to death and the destruction of Israel.
When he talks about the division of families against themselves, he is quoting from the prophet Micah, who is speaking about this previous destruction of Israel.
He is speaking prophetically – he knows that his message is not one that will be received openly by many, but rather only by a few. It will set people against each other. It will cause division, because it is a message that is hard, while appearing simple. There will be many who prefer what they think of as the easy route. But this is a necessary message that he is bringing. He is impatient to deliver this message, to have it taken up by humanity.
The language of division that he uses is a familiar one to us today, as we live in a world which seems to be more and more reverting to nationalism and tribalism. And yet Jesus is not seeking to use the language of division and othering to further his aims, instead he is being honest when he admits that the truth will cause division – that there will be those who refuse to accept the truth because they are unable to adjust or change, or admit that they were wrong.
A superficial reading of Luke 12 can allow us to portray Jesus as an apocalyptic judgemental figure, dividing us into the saved and the damned. Other extracts of the Gospels can help support this view. Many Christian leaders throughout history have leant into this idea of the final judgement where the righteous will be saved (normally themselves) and the others will be damned. They will say that there is a single route to righteousness, and we must all follow it to be saved. All too often though, they want us to listen to what they are saying, and not what God is saying.
But we have to read the Gospel, and indeed the whole of scripture, in its totality, not picking on the bits that we want to listen to.
The Bible is not a self-help manual, with a simple remedy for the human condition or a ten-step programme, logically arranged to take you in a straightforward and logical progression from discontent to contentment.
Instead the Bible is the product of that innumerable cloud of witnesses that the writer of Hebrews invokes. It is a myriad of stories about people and their relationship to God, each told in a different voice, and each testifying to a different experience of God.
Few of these stories have happy endings. There is no simple remedy for the broken-ness of the world. These people may have had faith in God, and God certainly had faith in them and in his covenants with them, but ultimately they are still trapped in sinfulness.
They cannot lift their heads up high enough to see that it is not their own salvation that is the end-goal, or the salvation of Israel, or the salvation of humanity, but the salvation of all of creation that is the goal and that God is asking up to partake in.
But God never gives up, and ultimately, in the faithfulness of his Son, who is faithful to death, in that faith, all of creation is reconciled to God.
Because Jesus isn’t just some wise-man dispensing philosophical one-liners about being nice to each other. Jesus is King and Prophet, the Messiah, the Son of God.
Jesus is very aware that he is part of God’s overarching salvation work that permeates the whole story of creation. The secret to life isn’t just being nice to each other. The secret to life, true life, is God, because life isn’t just a transient existence between what we perceive as our birth and our death. Life is us being invited by God to partake in God’s salvation story. And that salvation story is not just us ensuring that we, individually, will be saved. Yes, God loves and cherishes each of us individually, but he also loves and cherishes all aspects of his own creation, and we are called into his work of salvation for all of creation, not just for ourselves.
And as Jesus warns us here, aligning ourselves with God’s plans for creation runs the risk of causing friction, dissent and disagreement. Not because God is looking to create disorder or disharmony – exactly the opposite. God is looking to bring everything into harmony with Him. No, it is because we seem to be so often naturally disinclined to act in a way that brings us into harmony with God. It is in our God-given nature to be rebellious, because God created us free-willed, not as slaves or servants.
God did not choose to populate his creation with puppets, but with free creatures. It is more pleasing to God that we should choose to be good and faithful, than that we should be compelled to be.
What does this mean for us as God’s creations. It certainly does not mean that there is one ‘right’ way to live – a single formula which if only we all followed, we would all be righteous. Scripture shows us a wonderful set of stories about people and their relationships, good and bad, with God. It shows us that God values our diversity and our differences. The Bible is not simple. In some respects, it is not helpful. The Bible, like Jesus, rarely, if ever, provides straightforward answers. What it does is affirm that the questions that we ask are questions which we should be asking of God and of ourselves, because we can see that faithful people have been asking these questions of God for all of history.
Each of these people is faithful in their own way, because God has created us all wonderfully diverse, and that creation is fundamentally and essentially good in every way. Like all of creation, we will be perfected when creation is returned to the state that God created it in, but that perfection will be a perfection in diversity and community, not a perfection in unity and uniformity. Just as the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father, so too we are not each other, but each are uniquely ourselves, fearfully and wonderfully made by God, individually loved and cherished by him.
Jesus’ warning is valid though, even for us today. As a church, as Jesus predicted, we are divided by many things. We seek out prophetic voices, but we must take care, as God warns Jeremiah, to discern between the prophet who just has a dream, and the one who has God’s word faithfully.
Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace to the earth, but rather it is the case that the earth is not fully prepared to hear of the peace that he brings because it is too radical a type of peace, that we are unable to comprehend the full strain that such a peace will put upon us. We are not able to change ourselves enough to embrace the peace that he brings, and instead we demand peace on our own terms, which is just division against someone else, further off.
But Jesus has come to us, and has given us a taste of that peace. Only in Jesus can we see the peace that he brings; the peace that is harmony and rightness, not just with each other, but with God and all of his creation. And in us, in his church, we are the harbingers of the Kingdom that will come. We are the clouds in the west, that foretell the rain tomorrow, or the wind from the south that foretells the heat to come. We are called to be faithful to God, as he is faithful to us, so that all may see the signs of the Kingdom to come.