Sermon: The Sword

Grace Presbyterian Church

March 12, 2017, Lent 2A

Jeremiah 20:7-13; Matthew 10:24-39

The Sword

Honestly, this just doesn’t fit.

We call Jesus the Prince of Peace. We sing a whole lot, particularly around Christmastime, about peace – “Sleep in heavenly peace,” or “Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace,” or there are songs like “I’ve got peace like a river” or any hymn based on St. Francis’s prayer, “Make me an instrument of your peace.” In fact, if you go to the back of the hymnal and look at the indexes, you’ll see that in the Subject Index “peace” actually gets two different sections – “Peace, Personal (Spiritual)” and “Peace, World.”

And it’s not as if Jesus doesn’t have plenty to say about peace: earlier in this gospel, one of the Beatitudes plainly stated “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (5:9). John 14:27 records Jesus’s words to his disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” And in almost all of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus recorded in the gospels, one of the first things Jesus says is some variant of “Peace be with you.”

And yet, there’s verse 34 in today’s reading, with Jesus saying plain as day, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

A sword?

Not what we want to hear.

Even another gospel writer, Luke, seems to be in agreement with us. When Luke records this teaching, he replaces the word “sword” with “division.” Now that sits uncomfortably enough in our ears, but “a sword”? We can’t bear to hear that.

But Matthew pulls no punches. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace,” Jesus says. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And he doesn’t stop there, but goes on to suggest that families will be divided – man against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law – and flat-out upends what we would call “family values” altogether. The final sentence seems hardest of all: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

The modern church has built up a veritable cottage industry around being peacemakers and generally promoting the idea that peace is the way to live. But Jesus doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience with that idea here. Before we despair too much, though, it’s a good idea to back up and hear what has brought Jesus to this point. What sounds like a total renunciation at first turns out to be a simple statement of fact.

This passage we have heard today is part of a larger unit of teaching with a specific purpose. Jesus is, from the beginning of chapter 10, preparing his twelve disciples to go out and do the teaching, preaching, and healing that he himself had been doing. This teaching and sending is not described here in the same degree of detail as it is in other gospels – Matthew never does record the disciples’ return from this commissioning, for example – but this commissioning does have parallels in the other gospels. On the other hand, Jesus’s teaching in those other gospels is not quite so stark and pointed as what Matthew records.

Already in verse 16 Jesus has warned the disciples that he is sending them out as “sheep in the midst of wolves” and that they should be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” which suggests that their experience will be a bit more challenging than your average Vacation Bible School. Verse 22 makes the warning more explicit: “you will be hated by all because of my name.” So when Jesus says in verse 24 that “a disciple is not above the teacher,” he is making clear to his disciples that they should, if they are truly following him, expect the same kind of attacks and slander that he has experienced.

What we often forget or overlook here, though, is that the attacks and slander Jesus has experienced and will experience, and that Jesus warns his disciples that they will experience, aren’t from random strangers. Jesus isn’t being challenged by “the world,” that generic boogeyman we in the church love to conjure up; Jesus is being challenged by the religious authorities of his time and place. Beginning in chapter 9 Matthew records the Pharisees, the great advocates of cultic and personal piety and purity in Jesus’s day, increasingly turning their questioning towards Jesus, culminating in the strange accusation in 9:34, after Jesus has cast out a demon, that “by the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons.” In short, they’re charging Jesus with being in league with the devil.  And Jesus rightly points out in 10:25 that if the religious authorities are willing to say that about Jesus, the disciples can’t expect to be treated any differently.

In the midst of this uncertainty, Jesus takes pains to remind his disciples that for all the likelihood of false accusation and defamation, betrayal and hatred, they are watched and cared for by God, the one who cares even for those two-for-a-penny sparrows. Even that comfort seems a bit late, when Jesus’s idea of reassurance is that the disciples be less concerned over “those who can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul” and more over the one who can kill both. I’m guessing that by now the disciples are wondering what they’ve signed on for after all. Even after the Sermon on the Mount and the healing episodes Matthew describes in chapter 8, this commissioning speech must have felt a bit jarring to a bunch of fishermen. Being scorned as poor dumb fishermen was one thing, but family turning on you? Being attacked by the Pharisees? They couldn’t have expected this.

Then the hard sentence, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” which makes sense in the context in which Jesus has already spoken – if you follow me, if you truly follow me and do the will of God and live into the kingdom of Heaven, the sword will find you. Even if you’re living into that beatitude about “Blessed are the peacemakers,” the sword will find you. But you are not abandoned, any more than those two-a-penny sparrows. And even the losing of one’s life – whether in a literal sense or in the sense of one’s life being truly absorbed into following Jesus in genuine and submitted discipleship – will end with life, true life, real life found, not lost. On the other hand, those whose life is caught up in the world, congruent with the world’s standards – or even the standards of the empire-accommodated church so prominent these days – will find their lives are truly lost.

In the end, then, that hard sentence is just practical advice – know what you’re getting into, know what’s coming, know that the sword will find you. And follow Me anyway.

For the One who cares for us even when the sword comes, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#829            My Faith Looks Up to Thee

#478            Save Me, O God, I Sink in Floods (Psalm 69)

#718            Take Up Your Cross, the Savior Said

#661            Why Should I Feel Discouraged?

Credit: agnusday.org (consider it a word of caution...)