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| (this one looked Pinteresting) |
Matthew 10:26-39
About ten years ago, I took an internship for a youth group
near Portland, OR. My former youth minister hired me to help his new church’s
youth ministry out for the summer. An
unbridled 22-year-old, who was theologically trained at a place called the
Honor Academy, led the youth group. The
Honor Academy was a pl Participants studied the bible
and went through an actual military style boot camp. This may sound odd, but theologically, the
Honor Academy believes the world is a battlefield, where Christians are engaged
daily in spiritual warfare. Sin must be
sought out and destroyed, and community is focused on allegiance to a, less
than
ace that trained young people to be both seminarians and soldiers.
metaphoric, Lord’s army.
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| My Episcopal youth group can't believe I used to sing this every Sunday in church |
This couldn’t have been a more imperfect place for me to
spend my summer. My hair was long, I
rarely wore shoes, and I kept a copy of Thoreau poems in my backpack. I was a zealot for my new college identity,
and a self-declared pacifist… you know… to match my outfit.
Somewhere between arbitrary boycotts of companies, a secular
CD smash, and the overuse of video clips from the Passion of the Christ to make sermon illustrations, I spoke up. I sat in the youth minister’s office and said
rather boldly, ‘you know, I think Jesus was against violence.’ I mentioned the Sermon on the Mount where
Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek and when Jesus told Peter to put his
sword away. The bleach blond youth
minister grinned at me across his desk, opened his bible and pointed to Matthew
10:34. “So how do you explain Jesus
saying he came with a sword?”
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| The Gospel according to Djesus |
“It doesn’t say that…”
“Well he probably meant…”
“Maybe somebody…”
“…I don’t have a response”
Almost ten years later… I finally have a response:
NT Wright describes passages like this as Jesus
turning up the volume. We as Christians
often times settle in and are lulled to a celestial sleep by passages about not
worrying, fearing not, and turning the other cheek. Picking through these passages like a
biblical buffet can lead one to make the assumption that being a Christian
means being a passive-ist. I just need to keep my hands clean, stay out
conflict and show kindness to others. But
then passages like Matthew 10:34 come along and the volume on the little
lullaby gets turned up so loud the speakers begin to distort and vibrate and
Jesus shouts over the top of the noise, ‘Are
you still paying attention?’
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| Vinyl bro... vinyl |
To understand what the Gospel writer meant in Matthew 10:34
we have to start with the original Greek.
The first thin The word for peace is eirēnēn. It
is the same word used in the Ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew bible, the
Septuagint (one of the oldest translations we have today), for the word shalom. For the Jews, shalom meant more than just
peace or tranquility. Shalom was about
hope, wholeness, and oneness with God.
It was about inner peace, relational peace, political peace, and harmony
in the creation all at once. It was
understood that when the Messiah comes, it would be the era of shalom. For Jews it was all about shalom; not dying
and going to heaven or saving my soul from hell, in the end there was just
shalom.
g that’s troubling is Jesus said he ‘didn’t come to bring
peace.’
This is where the
passage is problematic. Jesus isn’t
bringing shalom but a sword? But didn’t
he just say don’t attack the Romans?
Didn’t he just say going to war against them would be a failure? Is Jesus now declaring war and if we read
further into the passage is Jesus declaring war on families?
Back to the Greek: The word translated, bring, is balló, when it
is conjugated in the active voice, like it is here, it can also be translated:
to cast, throw or rush. In other words, Jesus
said, ‘I didn’t come to jam Shalom down your throats.’
I feel like from here we can sit back and enjoy the lullaby
again, like Jesus’ love, shalom isn’t going to be forced on us. We have free will, etc. But this business about bringing a sword distorts
the pleasant sounds and Jesus’ hyperbolic ways gets our attention again.
One more bit of Greek:
If we keep going with this interpretation, Jesus is essentially saying,
I didn’t come to force shalom on you, but rather I came to force the machaira! This
word is not typically used to describe the weapon kind of sword, the word most
commonly used for a sword used in battle is rhomphaia. A machairas is probably better described as a smaller knife. It was not uncommon for people to carry
machairas on their belt and it was usually used to skin animals or gut fish. A machaira was like a filet knife.
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| Google: Macharia Blade |
In other words:
Jesus didn’t come to force peace on the world, he didn’t come to solve the
problems around you, to make that relative you have a grudge with go away, to
make the addict in your family stop using, or pay off your credit card debt. No, no matter how much you love Jesus, you
are still utterly powerless over the behavior of others and the unintended outcomes
of your choices. Jesus never promised to
absolve you from consequences or make your circumstances better.
Instead, Jesus promises
his followers will be cut wide open.
Denial is a powerful
lie. It is the delusion that says, ‘if
so and so would just change, then I
would be happy/safe/healthy/stress free/fine.’
When I moved to
Nashville in the summer of 2005, I was angry.
My parents were recently divorced and it became a bitter badge of honor
I displayed proudly. My depression, my
financial troubles, my string of dysfunctional relationships, or my emotional
volatility could all be excused because my parents marriage was so ugly. A friend of mine once remarked, ‘you complain
a lot.’ And I looked her in the eye and
said, ‘well I have a lot to complain about.’
And I meant it. My problems were
based on my circumstances, my world was out to get me, and if all of these
factors would just change, I would be
happy. Also during this time my mother’s
drinking became unmanageable, my badge shimmered brighter and my denial grew
out of control.
I was really good at
recognizing the evil all around me. I
would condemn it, and distance myself from it.
It was really important that my friends had the same opinion about
people as I did. It hurt my feelings
when my friends would hang out with my enemies.
For a time, I really had nothing nice to say about anybody. I couldn’t understand how people could love that person and me. But as I continued
to eliminate the threats around me, my life didn’t get any less chaotic or
painful. In fact, as I got older, my
brokenness compounded.
In C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace’s
greed and resentment leads him into a cave where he is turned into a
dragon. In order to be turned back into
a boy he must shed his dragon skin. Like
a snake, he tries to gently shed his skin layer by layer but this only makes the
dragon skin grow back thicker and tougher.
It takes Aslan’s help. The lion’s
claw cuts into him so deep that Eustace thinks the lion is ripping into his
heart. When the skin is off, Aslan
throws Eustace into a lake to be cleansed and he describes such agonizing burning
and pain. However, after a moment, he
realizes he is free and back to being a small boy and the joy of that freedom
is far more intense than any pain he feels.
Jesus said, ‘do not
fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul!’ (Matthew 10:28a)
and ‘whoever loses their life for my sake, will find it’ (Matthew 10:39b).
The life you will
find in the midst of this kind of suffering will over shadow any pain you feel
or will feel. The pain may never go away,
however, pain isn’t such a bad thing.
But oh to find life, Jesus says, is truly wonderful.
Two years ago, I
went to my first al-anon meeting. For
years, people recommended I go, but I was stubborn and thought 12-step meetings
were for weirdos. I hit rock bottom as
the shame and fear and loneliness I carried around was becoming unmanageable. I’m not sure why I dragged my feet so long in
going, I think it was fear of facing my deepest discomforts or perhaps it was
fear that if I tried this and it didn’t help I’d be out of options.
That first meeting
was heavy, I felt like Eustace being thrown into that pool. But as I listened to other people tell their
stories that were so similar to mine and I saw the way that shame and guilt and
fear and hurt and sadness no longer had power over them; that despite the
brokenness of the people around them they were able to find some sense of this
shalom Jesus is talking about… I was overcome with such a painful
humility. I have so much work to do. I felt like a little boy. But for the first time I had a vision for my
freedom. It was quite painful but I
experienced my pain with such joy!
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| ...but you promised!!! |
In the time since
that first meeting, I’ve gotten married, bought a house, and have learned how
to be there for my mother. Life is
currently wonderful and I often find myself settling into that old
lullaby. But the more I seek the Kingdom
of God, the more I try to expand my capacity to love and be loved, the more I
realize how much work I have left to do.
Like the time my wife and I planned to go to the movies and she got
sick. I threw a tantrum like a spoiled
child because I wanted to go to the movies.
Yeah…I wish I were a better man sometimes.
In a world where we
are so utterly powerless over what other people think, feel and do. It is imperative that we face our pain head
on because that is a choice we can
make. Our actions, thoughts and feelings
either disrupt or bring harmony to the world around us. There is no middle ground. Growing up in a dysfunctional family it was
easy to blame my parents but that blaming didn’t make my problems go away. After taking a moral inventory of my own
life, deeply contemplating my sorrows and conflicts, I realized that although
some of my circumstances weren’t my fault, I had a responsibility in all of them. The more I allow God to cut me open, the
better I can understand and articulate what those responsibilities are and that
wonderful shalom builds a Kingdom of God in my soul. But it doesn’t stop there, it begins to spill
out to the world around me and things begin to heal and become whole again. It is in this space and only this space, I
finally have something to offer the world.
I finally have something to share with those in need. I have time and energy for my loved
ones. I have the energy and courage to
reconcile relationships. And in those
times when I get irritable, tired, overwhelmed with anxiety, or lonely I return
to Jesus’ machaira: I rest, I get
some exercise, I talk it out, and/or I go to a recovery meeting. Then
Jesus opens me up again and it hurts… but oh it hurts so good.
God’s shalom is very
near, may you have the courage, strength and communal support to receive it.
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| The Kingdom of God begins with you |
