Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 5:1-7
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Jesus asks his disciples. “No, I tell you, but rather division.”
At first glance, Jesus’ proclamation seems to resonate profoundly with our current cultural moment, which has a surplus of division and a deficit of peace. The faction-based rhetoric clogging our airwaves and the vitriol that plagues our social media sites seems just the sort of thing that divides “father against son” and “mother against daughter.”
We have elevated divisiveness to an art form, so that not just households, but communities, classrooms, and congregations bear the marks of estrangement. Even among followers of Christ, virtues like gentleness and kindness are dismissed as “political correctness,” and a willingness to offend is worn as a badge of honor.
It’s not hard to see why this Jesus found in Luke chapter 12 might excite some readers. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” it seems, has been replaced by a tough-talking firebrand who tells it like it is and who isn’t afraid to burn bridges and upset apple carts.
Imagine this Jesus on Twitter, taking no prisoners as he drops truth bombs, 140 characters at a time. At first glance, this is a Messiah tailor-made for our times. But a first glance, at this biblical passage or any other, hardly makes for a responsible or faithful reading of God’s word. We have to ask whether Jesus is really laying out the kind of iconoclastic vision that animates our political rallies and fills our Facebook pages, or if, when he informs his disciples not to anticipate that he will bring peace, he might be getting at something deeper.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Perhaps the peace Jesus is talking about in this passage, the kind of peace we shouldn’t expect him to inaugurate, is not the Shalom of God at all. Maybe Jesus is not referring to the wholeness and reconciliation that we encounter throughout the narrative of Scripture as God’s vision for a sin-scarred and fragmented world, but rather a cheap imitation.
Perhaps the idea of peace that Jesus is addressing here is rooted not in anything like the flourishing of the Kingdom, but rather in our desire for comfort and security, a desire that stands in the way of the real wholeness that God desires. The “peace” that Jesus seeks not to inaugurate, but to overturn, might be the sort of peace that we assume comes when our lives are free of conflict, simply because we isolate ourselves from anyone and anything that might challenge us.
Far too often, we long for refuge and security above all else. Far too often, we build wind tunnels to silence the voices that might unsettle us, and in doing so, we drown out the voice of a God who seeks to transform us. The Old Testament prophets proclaimed that the children of Israel had placed—or misplaced—their trust in their lineage. The fact that they were descendants of Abraham inspired a false sense of security. This security led to complacency, the prophets alleged, and then to neglect of the covenant.
This is the motivation behind Isaiah’s song of the vineyard. After clearing the ground, planting choice vines, and even building a watchtower, the “Beloved” waits in anticipation for his vineyard to bear fruit. Yet the harvest yields nothing but wild grapes. The fruitlessness of his cared-for piece of land leads the Beloved to tear down the hedge of protection he had built, leaving the vineyard to descend into ruin.
In the same way, the people of Israel and Judah, confident in their ethnicity, in their heritage, in their identity as God’s chosen people, failed to embrace the very things—justice, righteousness, mercy—for which they were planted in the first place. They had been given an opportunity to flourish together as the people of God in a corrupt world. Instead, they were falling apart, exiled and scattered, cut off from the land and from the institutions in which they had rooted their identity.
When Jesus spoke of bringing division, even discord, he wasn’t talking about division for its own sake. Jesus was not merely a dangerous agitator, no matter what his enemies might have alleged. But he knew that the people of his day had often grounded their identity and their hopes for a meaningful unity in the wrong things. He knew that the Gospel of the Kingdom would inevitably disrupt some of the bonds—familial ties, ethnic and national allegiances—in which the people of God had sought security to the detriment of God’s purposes.
Jesus knew this because he had seen it in his own life and in his own family. He had felt rejection from his fellow Nazarenes and even from his own brothers. He had experienced firsthand the division that can occur when the message of the Kingdom, spoken and lived, upsets the balance of a household.
The Gospel does not call us to tear down community indiscriminately, or to reject solidarity out of hand. Rather, it compels us to sacrifice counterfeit community and false comfort in order to ground our life together in the right things. It calls us not to grow as wild grapes, but to abide together in the true vine, that we might bear much fruit and that we might understand our identity as the people of God in more faithful ways.
Such abiding is not easy, as Jesus and the prophets well knew. Even as our beloved vinedresser cultivates and prunes us, there will be times when we will feel alone in the world. Even as we contribute to the harvest of the Kingdom, there will be times when we long for comfort and refuge.
The letter to the Hebrews describes the experiences of faithful saints who were “stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.” These prophets, martyrs, and servants of God undoubtedly longed for peace, but in their obedience only encountered division and alienation. At times they were excluded from human community and cut off even from their own families.
Yet, in the midst of this division, they were drawn into something greater. They were becoming part of a great cloud of witnesses that extends through time and includes the communion of the living and the dead. They were drawn into a deeper and more substantial unity with the people of God at all times and places, and with the Son of God, seated at the right hand of the Father.
Jesus, our Prince of Peace, who in his flesh has “broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility that is between us” (Ephesians 2:14), is more than a prophet of discord. Through his life, death, and resurrection, he has inaugurated a kingdom in which one day, people of every tribe, tongue and nation will gather around the throne of God. But in order to embrace that kingdom, in order to enter into that true communion, those with ears to hear must be willing to let go of the second-rate peace that comes from a false unity built on allegiances that do not endure.
Like so many before us, our obedience to the Gospel of the kingdom may invite scorn and contempt from those around us. We may feel the sword of division pierce our comfortable existence. But if we are abiding in the True Vine, and if our Beloved Vinedresser is cultivating and pruning us, we can be confident that we are also being drawn into a deeper and more lasting communion with God and with God’s people.