Fr Mark Schultz
Dear Friend,
Our Office Gospel this morning is a difficult one. Jesus has just spoken about the preciousness of a human life, has urged the disciples not to be afraid of persecution, and has followed this up with an injunction to stand firm in the faith, to confess Jesus and not deny him. To which he adds, 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.”
We can see that the movement of the passage we’ve been working through over the past few days in the Daily Office is about how following Jesus may not make for a particularly easy or comfortable life. Following Jesus may mean persecution. It may mean some relationships become difficult, that they become fraught or end either quietly or spectacularly.
And why should this be so? We get a hint in that word “peace” at the beginning of today’s reading. The peace of God that passes all understanding (Phil. 4:7), the peace that Jesus gives that is not as the world gives (John 14:27) is a peace the world does not and cannot recognize as peace…because it’s the world’s undoing. The peace the world gives is a peace kept at the edge of a sword, a peace forged through violence and scapegoating, a peace that worldly powers maintain through persecution. Jesus does not desire this peace for us and will not give it to us; the peace that Jesus gives is an end to all that violence. The incomprehensibly wonderful peace of God looks, to the world—to all the ways we have of being-toward each other culturally, socially, politically—like the end of the world. Because it is.
Part of Jesus’ mission among us (while he walked with us before his ascension, yes, but even now, as we know him and are known by him in the Sacraments and in the work of the church), is to separate us from our addiction to the world’s false, bloody, and bloodthirsty peace so that we can both desire and receive a peace that is truly worthy of the name…and that is inseparable from love. Jesus’ inversions of “peace” and “sword” here in this reading are signs that what he’s up to is the upending of the world and its violent systems, orders, and structures: the patterns of sin and death that construct us and the world we live in and that look to us like life-as-usual (even, as Jesus in this passage goes on to suggest, those aspects of life-as-usual like family that we often think of as good-in-themselves and not in need of redemption; indeed, beloved, all of our relationships and the ways by which those relationships are structured are in need of redemption!)). The sword here—which Paul understands as the word of God (Heb. 4:12)—is like a scalpel, separating us from the sin that clings so closely (Heb. 12:1). Jesus’ words are the sword meant to challenge and provoke us, to catalyze our faith, and to make us ask ourselves: if peace as I know it is not what Jesus desires for me, then into what new thing is Jesus calling me? What new thing does Jesus desire for me that I cannot now grasp or imagine, and how can Jesus’ desire become my own? How can I pray for this newness that God imagines for me even though I cannot imagine it for myself?
Beloved, God’s peace is the undoing of the world’s violence; the world’s peace is a violence that has no part in God…and, indeed, it was for the sake of this “peace” that Jesus was made a scapegoat and crucified: he was killed for being a disturber of the “peace;” he was killed to keep the “peace.” And as grace gradually removes us from the world’s peace and nurtures us in God’s peace (as we are, in Saint Paul’s words, delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of Jesus [Col. 1:13]), as it re-orders us and our relationships toward a love deeper than the world can understand, our separation from the world’s ways may sting like antiseptic applied to a wound; but as we grow stronger in grace, stronger in love, stronger in peace, stronger in faith and in hope, as the world loses its grip on us, we become signs of the world’s undoing, heralds of redemption, living outposts of the Kingdom that is Coming. Just as Jesus catalyzed faith through word and deed, through his life, death and resurrection, we become catalysts, too…and the world is bound to notice, and will likely not take too kindly to being shown that judgment has been passed on it and its reign of violence has been ended.
Dear Friend, how might we pray for the peace that passes understanding? How might we allow the Great Physician to heal us through word and sacrament? How might we become signs of the peace the world can neither give nor comprehend? How might we follow Jesus today?
Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+