“[Jesus said,] 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.'”
--Matthew 10: 34-39
Don’t ever say that God does not have a sense of humor; after all, on Father's Day we heard this Gospel where Jesus says to his 12 apostles that he has come to pit fathers against children and that anyone who loves their father or mother more than him is not worthy of Jesus. I wish I could say that I intentionally picked this reading just to mess with all of you, but that’s just the hand of God at work in our lectionary. It sure made me laugh, though.
We might hear Jesus say these words and immediately think that he’s somehow anti-family. That’s not what’s going on here, but for anyone out there who likes to talk about so-called ‘Christian family values,’ this passage does undermine that sentiment. The truth is that Jesus isn’t really a champion of ‘family values.’ Instead, he has what we might call ‘kingdom values,’ and very rarely are those two ever the same thing.
Last week we heard Jesus call and send forth his 12 apostles, and in this passage, which picks up after that, we hear him warning them what it really means to follow him as a disciple and to be sent forth by him as an apostle. In short, it means being willing to lose everything that they think is important. At the top of this list is family.
But consider what that would have meant in Jesus’ time. Even more so than now, family meant security in first century Palestine. One’s survival and prosperity were deeply tied to one’s family; that is, after all, the whole point of marriage at this time: to insure the name and legacy survives and that the two families become prosperous. All of this was tied to the need for security, to feel comfortable, at ease, content, and not at all fearful. The goal in life, then, was to find one’s security and to hold onto it by any means necessary.
This is a concept that is not bound to distant years in Palestine; this is still very true in our time. Every single day we make decisions based on the question: how can I maintain security for me and mine? This extends out beyond our nuclear families to our religious communities, our social circles, and especially to our broader, national identities. Furthermore, very often when the primary motivation of an individual or a particular group of people is their continued security, other people suffer. We need only look at Jesus’ homeland today to see how the need for security has resulted in human rights violations, or better still, we can look to the history of our own country, where laws were passed just after the Civil War that prohibited the rights of freed black people because white folks were afraid that they would rise up and seek revenge for the sin of slavery. The need for security always seems to result in hardship.
This is what Jesus has come to upend. The point of his message is to separate us from all of those things with which we have overly identified to the point that we can only find our sense of comfort and security in them—our sports teams, our jobs and their benefits, our churches, our political parties, our family names and reputations, our national pride, our privilege and cultural ignorances, and every other idol in our lives that we keep holding onto, thinking that our identity lies in them. Jesus ain’t got time for that! This is what Paul when he says, “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God is Christ Jesus (Romans 6: 11).” It means letting all the rest die so that Christ is our only identifier, and when Christ is our only identifier, then we can give up this false pursuit of security because we know, to borrow Jesus’ own words, that to lose our life for his sake is to find it. There is no need for security when we are alive in Christ.
The fallacy of security is also tied the gospel of scarcity. When we believe that there isn’t enough for everyone, we get scared, we hoard, we refuse to share, and we ignore the needs of others. Since the days of Jesus those in power have lied to society’s poor, pitting them against each other and telling them that only the laws and legislations set forth by the rich and powerful will keep them safe. Jesus calls out those lies for what they are and shows us how they are grounded in fear, but perfect love, his love, as we know, casts out that fear.
Maybe we need to hear this Gospel now more than ever because we have been held in the grip of fear, and in these last days we have seen just how right Jesus was. In the before time, the long, long ago of February, we clung to all of those other identifiers that we thought protected us from seeing the world for what it really is. We ignored the regular, day-to-day injustices of our lives because we had all that other identifiers in our lives to distract us and give us a false sense of security.
But COVID didn’t care about any of that and tore right through it. Lately, we have come to realize just how empty all of those identifiers really are: sports teams—what sports?!—our jobs and their benefits—how many of us have been laid off and how many “essential” workers still don’t have a living wage or health care??—our churches—some may be, foolishly, coming back together, but we’ve had to relearn that our buildings are meaningless if the real Church, the people, are sick and can’t come together. The wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world has been brought to its knees, in large part because of the false gospel of scarcity that said we couldn’t take care of everyone who is sick. The veil has been lifted on that false gospel. And by the grace of God, since the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we have been shown that the institutions in which we have placed our sense of security in this country are deeply troubled and in need of reform.
People are starting to see the illusion of security that all of those things gave us in the before time, and for the Church this time right now is a new prophetic call for a moral revival, as the scales from our eyes are at last falling away, and all those identifiers and the security and scarcity they embody are being seen for what they are.
Jesus was trying to get his apostles to understand that to be a part of this Jesus Movement, to identify with him and to pattern their lives after him, meant total surrender of everything else. There’s no such thing as a part-time disciple or quarter-time apostle! Our world is filled with distractions, filled with promises of power, prestige, and possessions that all lie to us and tell us that we can find our needs met and find our security in them. Jesus called these things Satan: anything that lies to us and pulls us away from our true identity . If we want to maintain this false sense of security, then by all means we can keep relying on those other identifiers, or we turn to Jesus.
If we are really serious about Jesus and being a part of the Movement that he started, then that means letting our sense of security die with those other identifiers, so that he may be our only identifier. It means making our lives images of his own, seeking justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with our God; proclaiming that—despite what we see—this is the year of the Lord’s favor, as we don’t just preach good news for the poor but we mobilize ourselves to bring that good news and be repairers of the breaches. His words about renouncing family mean simply that we must elevate Jesus’ life and message above everything else in our lives.
Yes, it’s risky and often costly, just as Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Oscar Romero, all of whom stood up to oppressive systems that provided people with a false sense of security, all of whom were killed by those systems. We may be asked to take a risk ourselves, but in the end it is always worth it because, while we may lose our false life, we will gain our real one. This is what it means to live into our ‘kingdom values,’ to really be alive in Christ Jesus.