Jesus
said to his Apostles:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
For I have come to set
a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s enemies will be those of his household.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
For I have come to set
a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s enemies will be those of his household.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
For I have come to set
a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s enemies will be those of his household.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
For I have come to set
a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s enemies will be those of his household.
Matthew 10:34-11
This is tough language. Jesus clearly anticipates that
his message will be rejected and rejected hard. Elsewhere, he will
say that the people who reject the message will believe they are doing so in
the name of God. (John 16:2)
We allow ourselves the luxury of thinking that the people who
reject the divine message are overtly bad. They are probably greedy,
arrogant, or mean-spirited. Maybe they are nasty, dogmatic people
who forget to obey the spirit of the law in their zeal for the letter of the
law. Maybe they are weak-willed and permissive, and are so habitual
in their challenge of the law and tradition that they wind up advocating a cold
intolerance of a different sort.
If a vision of God has broad appeal on one end of the political
or the other, it is probably wrong. God did not become incarnate to
advocate liberalism or conservativism, capitalism or socialism, one public
policy over another. He was offering something that transcended all of
that and, as a result, something that would be outright incomprehensible to the
purveyors of cultural acceptability. But he didn’t come to be culturally acceptable.
