Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our Lord has some difficult words for us today in the Office Gospel: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” It’s not the sort of thing we expect to hear from the Prince of Peace. How are we to wrap our minds, or better, our lives around such a saying? How are we to understand such a saying as good news?

One place to start might be with prayer (it's the only place to start, really)…and I’m thinking specifically of the Collect for Social Justice on page 209 of the Book of Common Prayer. Here’s what it says:

Almighty God, who hast created us in thine own image: Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression; and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice in our communities and among the nations, to the glory of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

What this prayer teaches us is that any peace with oppression is in fact no peace at all. Any peace with the powers and principalities of this world that seek to occlude or erase the image of God in any of God’s children is no peace—it’s a just a new way of blindly accommodating ourselves to death and sin. God Godself resists such a peace as God Godself resists such oppression, and this active resistance the church has classically understood as “the wrath of God.”

But let’s be clear here: the divisiveness that our reading refers to today (in fact, takes for granted as being part of the experience of what it means to believe in Jesus Christ) is not something willed by God—it arises from the intransigence of humanity, from humankind’s repeated insistence in following its own way; a way which, from the beginning, has been the way of self-seeking and sin, the way of death. John Chrysostom says as much in his Homily on Matthew, “The war is not then the effect of [God’s] purpose, but of [our] temper.” As the Prayer of Humble Access says (BCP, 337), God is “the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy,” but our sin-distorted temper rails against and rejects that mercy. God does not will our suffering. And God will not stop being righteous, holy, and merciful, however much it may pain us or inconvenience us to be reconciled to that righteousness, that holiness, that mercy through the hard wood of the cross (and Friend, there is no other way to be so reconciled). God is not concerned that our salvation should be comfortable, but that it should be real.

The sword of Christ, then, is a sword of grace and healing. Chrysostom even suggests in his homily that we might understand the sword Christ brings as a scalpel. Jesus is the physician of our souls and longs to remove from us the sin-sickness that has so long plagued us. It is often the case, however, that we prefer our illness to our healing. And this is perhaps one edge of the sword.

And the other edge is this: it is also the case that the world prefers us ill, that death prefers us in bondage to death. And don’t get me wrong: by “world,” here, I’m not talking about God’s good creation, but about the structures of violence, sin and self-seeking that humans have made and by which we’ve marred ourselves and the rest of creation. To live the Gospel of Jesus Christ, however, is to proclaim by thought, word and deed the end of death’s bondage, the end of the world as we’ve known it, the triumph of Christ over it, and the beginning of a new world—a world restored and renewed by God and to which our lives are being fitted by grace. The world that is passing away will do all it can to undo such a life of Christian witness by whatever means it can manage—distraction is a common one these days, distraction and isolation. But violence and discord are also to be expected—which is to say, we should expect to suffer the world’s indignation, we who are in- but not of the world. Our Lord suffered the same and more, and met the world’s deathliness with his own endlessness of Life and Love. Beloved, we should expect to do the same: in ourselves, our families, our friendships, at work, at school, in all of our relationships and in every aspect of our lives, we should expect to meet the world’s deathliness with the Life and Love of Jesus Christ, alive and loving in us.

Friend, to receive the searing grace of God that, in Eliot’s words, “redeems from fire by fire,” is to have our lives completely upended and reoriented. That can be painful in any number of ways, but that grace makes a way where we cannot is the best news you’ll hear all day. (!)

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+