Division – 16 August 2013

I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!  Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. [Luke 12: 49-53]

This is the gospel for next Sunday, and it is indeed difficult to know what to say about it.  This is not gentle Jesus meek and mild...  He sounds exasperated.  In the next few sentences, which I didn’t read to you, he berates them because they talk obsessively about the weather, which of course we do, constantly, but seem blind to how the world is going.  And that, as we know, is a little unjust.

His face was set towards Jerusalem, as the scripture puts it, so of course he was under stress.  Were followers quietly disappearing because of family ties and commitments?  Every parish minister knows that phenomenon.  And so, with what seems to be a note of bitterness, Jesus says that what’s coming will be anything but peace on earth and goodwill among men.  Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!  He illustrates with the instantly recognisable and always painful phenomenon of family division:  father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.  It sounds just as shocking as it generally is.   I often wonder whether the Family- First-type parties and groups, with their pictures of happy family units complete with a father and a mother actually at home, and grateful well-brought-up children, are paying any attention at all to realities.  Jesus, in his blackest moments, knows that whoever follows him is going to need a spirituality adequate to social ignorance and misunderstanding, hatreds and the parting of ways, sometimes in the so-called best families and social strata.  An email from a friend asks me how meditation helps when there has just been gross verbal abuse from a family member, leaving my correspondent shocked, angry and hurt. 

In the stillness and the silence, the waiting and the attention, we learn the graces of setting some things aside, declining the luxury of bitterness and retaliation, understanding that all is not fair or just, all is not as it should be and is unlikely to become so, seeing sometimes why things have happened as they do, renewing God’s gift of humility – and in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, forgiving as we are forgiven.  It is Jesus’s way, the path we walk.  Faith so often means the readiness to take the rough with the smooth, understand it, move on, put one foot in front of the other, refuse to dwell in memory and bitterness.