Summary: People who mainly attend church on only Christmas and Easter might get the impression that the entire gospel message consists of a baby born in a stable, who came to bring peace on Earth, who was inexplicably killed for his trouble but ultimately rose triumphant from the dead. In our text, however, Jesus said that he came to bring fire on the earth. How does that message fit with the peace he told his disciples he was offering, a peace he claimed the world could not take away?
In 1958, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote about the ethos from which the civil rights movement emerged.1 He recalled a conversation he had with an influential white citizen of Montgomery, Alabama, who asked why he and his associates had come to destroy what he called the city's long tradition of "peaceful and harmonious race relations."
King replied, "Sir, you have never had real peace in Montgomery. You have had a sort of negative peace in which the Negro too often accepted his state of subordination. But this is not true peace. True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. The tension we see in Montgomery today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace."
The young minister then pondered whether "this was what Jesus meant when he said, 'I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.' Certainly Jesus did not mean that he came to bring a physical sword," King wrote. "He seems to have been saying in substance: 'I have not come to bring this old negative peace with its deadening passivity. I have come to lash out against such a peace. Whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new. Whenever I come, a division sets in between justice and injustice. I have come to bring a positive peace which is the presence of justice, love, yea, even the Kingdom of God.'"
The Gospel text for today raises the question of how Jesus saw himself and how he defined his purpose in life. If someone asked you why Jesus came, how many of you would say that he came to cast fire upon the earth? Doesn't sound much like the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas, does it? And yet, that is exactly what he says in our text. What could he possibly mean?
Only recently had Jesus rebuked James and John for wanting to call down fire from heaven on some Samaritans who had not welcomed them.2 He led his disciples away without punishing the inhospitable Samaritans in any way. So, if Jesus wasn't eager to cast the fire of judgment upon the Earth then, what kind of fire was he talking about?
The fire Jesus wants to kindle is a fire to transform the human heart completely. John the Baptist described the purpose of this fire in Matthew 3:12, where he says the Messiah will "gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." He's using an agricultural metaphor to explain that Jesus intends to preserve what has value while obliterating whatever is worthless in our lives.
"The gospel will burn up with unquenchable fire everything that is evil, and leave nothing but that which is just and true," wrote 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon. "Of all things under heaven, the most intolerant is the gospel of Jesus Christ. ... The gospel is merciful to the sinner, but merciless to sin. It will not endure evil, but wars against it to overturn it ... the truth of God ... stands in the midst of the world an enemy of all unrighteousness, the foe of all oppression, the friend of the poor and needy, and the enemy of everything that is at enmity to God."3
Earlier in this Gospel, Luke says the angels sang of "Peace on Earth" as they announced Jesus' birth. Now, in this text, he records Jesus saying, "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the Earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!" In Matthew's version of this event, Jesus says even more pointedly, "I have not come to bring peace but a sword."4 So which is it -- peace, or war?
Lutheran pastor Sam Wellumson explains it this way: "The division Jesus speaks about is first and foremost within you. The work of God's Word is to separate you from your sin, and this isn't a pleasant operation. God talks about it as removing your heart of stone and giving you a heart of flesh. We'd prefer to postpone the operation. Maybe get a second opinion. But Jesus is ready to get the whole thing started."5
"In Christ, God is at war with sin," Wellumson continues. "The Great Physician is amputating what is incurable -- your sin, your evil, your wickedness. He took it upon himself and nailed it to the cross, buried it in the tomb, and left it there when he rose from the dead."
Beyond dividing us from our own sin, Jesus often divides people from one another. To be clear, he doesn't stir up strife just for the sake of a fight, but he wants people to understand that those who choose to follow him may experience conflict with people who take a different path.
Merriam-Webster chose "polarization" as its 2024 Word of the Year,6 given the way many friendships and family relations have fractured over political, religious, generational and other differences. Polarization comes from the Latin word polaris, which describes the Earth's poles. If people are polar opposites, it means they are totally opposed to one another.
When Czech teenager Lubomir Loucky gave his life to Christ, he found a sense of joy he had never known before. Raised in a nominally Catholic home, he longed for his parents to discover the same purpose he had. It was Lou's great honor to lead his father to faith before his father succumbed to the stomach cancer that killed him. After his father died, Lou was hanging the family laundry out to dry and quietly singing a hymn that brought him comfort. Hearing him singing, Lou's mother angrily confronted him.
"How can you sing when your father's body lies cold in the ground?" She asked. "I've never seen such disrespect in all my life."
At that moment, Lou felt as if he and his mother were poles apart. How could she, who had never known the assurance of everlasting life through the grace of God found in Jesus Christ, possibly comprehend the peace he had, knowing he and his father would see one another again in the afterlife?
Not long after, Lou's mother also became terminally ill. After a period of estrangement, the mother also embraced Jesus as her Savior, and mother and son were reconciled.
You may have heard the phrase, "The family that prays together, stays together." We'd like to believe that serving Jesus will keep our families from falling apart. But people who are faithful to God can experience conflict with family members, too, people like Abel, whose brother Cain killed him; or Eli, whose sons turned from God; or Hosea, whose wife broke her marriage vows. Jesus' own relatives didn't always understand or accept him either.
But family unity was not Jesus' highest priority. As much as it must have broken his heart to be misunderstood by his own brothers and sisters, he was laser-focused on doing God's will, regardless of what others thought. Jesus' relationship with his heavenly Father was the defining characteristic that shaped his entire life. Every other relationship existed within the context of his connection with God. And that is what Jesus requires from us as well. It is our relationship with God that gives us our truest identity, so that is the relationship that must be our highest priority.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't value our relationships with family and friends. But those relationships don't determine who we are or what we are called to do the same way our relationship with God does.
When Jesus began his ministry, he called people to repentance, which literally means to change. Jesus came not just to die for the world, but to change the world. And he still calls us to be changed, and to change the world, to help bring in God's kingdom, to work for shalom, true, deep, positive peace that is the presence of justice.
Jesus could have soft-pedaled his message to make it more palatable to his listeners, and avoided the cross. But he came to make hearts burn with the all-consuming fire of God's love and zeal for justice.
Jesus knows that taking up his mission will sometimes get us into trouble with people who believe he poses a threat to their preferred lifestyle, ideology, positions of privilege and power. We need to be prepared for the likelihood that some people will resist our work and accuse us of turning the world upside down.
Trouble comes to everyone. But to some extent, we can choose what kind of trouble we are going to get in.
On March 7, 1965, civil rights activist John Lewis and others marched peacefully across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to protest the killing of a church deacon by a state trooper. Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture, was one of 58 people who were beaten so badly by state troopers and sheriff's deputies that they had to be hospitalized.7
Lewis went on to serve as a congressional representative from the state of Georgia. He used to say, "Find a way to get in the way. Find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble."8
The hymn writer Albert B. Simpson asked the question, "What do you do with Jesus?" and declared, "Neutral you cannot be."9
Make no mistake about it, Jesus doesn't call us to secure eternal fire insurance and then do whatever we want to do with our lives. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to be willing to take up your cross and follow him to Calvary. Are you willing to risk life and limb, to get into "good trouble" just as he did?
God, grant us courage to answer his call.