As soon as I was asked to give this Chapel Hour and was told that the theme for this year was “Shalom” or “Peace,” I knew which passage from the Bible I would choose. It is from Luke and you have just heard it. I knew immediately that I would use it or its parallel from Matthew. I suspect you know that one also.
Matthew 10.34-39
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn
“‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
36
a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’[c]
But this immediate certainty also made me wary. Why did the theme of “Peace” make me so intent on choosing a Biblical passage in which Jesus denies that he brings peace. A passage in which he tells us that he has come to bring division or the sword. I had to ask myself, wasn’t this simply a desire to shock or scandalize people? Or was I just trying to tease the Reverend into thinking more deeply about peace? Or was I trying to appear more radical than I am?
Probably all of those things are true. But the deepest reason, and the only reason that is important, is that I chose this passage because I do not think that we can understand Christian peace until we understand it. It sits there in the Gospel of the Prince of Peace, like a huge stone that blocks our way. And not just in the Bible. In our lives too, Christ causes dissension and heartache. The life of a Christian is not all peace and love. There is conflict and struggle as well. So I do not think that we can understand Jesus Christ, that we can understand his message, until we have accepted the truth of what the Gospel tells us in these passages.
And it is simply this.
The Gospel destroys every false peace that exists. Every security to which we cling crumbles under the Gospel’s influence. Our ordinary identity, our identity as Japanese or American, as teacher or as student, as male or female, as rich or poor gets undone, and it melts away like the illusion upon which it is all based.
That is not, of course, the end of the story. We are indeed given a new self and new identity. We are called to build a new culture and even a new world, but still the beginning of the story and a continuing theme throughout, is not peace, but division; not peace but the sword. It is not just one country against another, or one group against another, but it enters into our homes and families. Our most intimate relations get tested, get undone, get redone by the Gospel.
Why is this? Why is it that every time I put one stone on top of another to build up my own being, Jesus comes and knocks it down?
It is simply this: whether we like to admit or not, we build our identity on the body of the victim. We build our community on the basis of the one whom we have expelled. This is our default position and Jesus knew this. The simple fact is that I can only tell myself that I am good, by having that goodness over against someone else who I think is “bad.” We don’t have to say this out loud. We don’t have to admit this to consciousness. We prefer not to. But just ask yourself: Are there people, is there someone, who you think is bad? Is there anyone about whom you secretly think, ‘Thank God I am not like that person’? Is there any group or kind of person, whom you might never harm, but you do not want to deal with them, to have anything to do with them.
When we get together, we have all kinds of ways of telling ourselves, “We are good” because “so and so” is worse than us. I am good because “so and so” is bad. I am “in” because this person is “out.” I am OK because these people are not. Our goodness, our identity almost always built up over against someone else and ultimately, whoever that someone else happens to be, that someone else is Christ and it is he whom we have excluded.
There is actually an example of this in the Gospel and I think this is the reason this little detail is included. It is in the Gospel of Luke. After Jesus has been arrested, Pilate sends him to Herod. Herod joins with his soldiers in treating Jesus with contempt and mocking him. He even clothes him in an elegant robe and then sends him back to Pilate. And then Luke writes: That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before that they had been enemies” (Lk. 23.12).
“Before that they had been enemies.” I ask you, is this Christian reconciliation? These two were enemies and now they have become friends. How? Through their common mistreatment of Jesus. Is this peace? It looks like peace. For Herod and Pilate it felt like peace. Before they were enemies and now they get along.
This is a kind of peace. It is the peace that world gives and that the world understands. It is, sadly, the peace that most of us live and understand. But it is not the peace of Jesus Christ. Rather, it is precisely this kind of peace that Jesus comes to destroy. In the place of this peace comes the sword.
