Thursday • 10/14/2021
Thursday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18; Jeremiah 38:1–13; 1 Corinthians 14:26-33a,37-40; Matthew 10:34–42

For comments on 1 Corinthians 14:20–42, see the DDD for Year 1, Tuesday of Lent 5 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Just when you think you’ve got Jesus figured out. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus highlights peaceability as a prime feature of life in his Father’s family: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). In that same vein, the apostle Paul, whom many think of as having a bit of a cantankerous streak in him, says, “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Romans 14:19), and “God is a God not of disorder but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:42b). 

It’s strange, then, perhaps jarring, to read of Jesus saying, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Not peace, but a sword? What gives? 

You don’t have to look far to find points of contention in our world. Some are innocent, even fun: Who’s your favorite team? Some are serious and knotty, threatening to rip our social fabric: What should be the role of police in our community? What is our responsibility to the unborn?

Where do we draw the  line, and, in the name of Jesus, say, “Not peace, but a sword”? 

In the context of Matthew 10, Jesus seems to me to have three things in view: 

Individuation. “…I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…” (Matthew 10:35).  Who we are, what we are going to believe, what our loyalties are going to be, and how we are to live, each of us has the responsibility to choose regardless of anybody else’s expectations. 

Each of us is more than the status into which we were born. Each of us receives a certain genetic makeup and a particular set of shaping forces: parents, siblings, nationality, neighborhood. We may be raised by “yellow dog Democrats” or “blue blood Republicans,” hair-on-fire fundamentalists or above-it-all progressives. But Jesus calls us, at some point in our lives, to be willing to separate ourselves from others’ expectations, and embrace our own loyalties and our unique identity. Sadly, that responsibility can leave us on the outside looking in. Except…

The Cross. … Except that the line of demarcation is the Cross of Jesus Christ. “[W]hoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38). Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr maintains that there is only one dividing line within humanity that is worth talking about: some of us believe we need a redeemer, and some don’t. When we realize that we—individually and societally and globally—are broken and in need of repair, and that repair has come in Jesus Christ, we find ourselves irreversibly and resolutely and unapologetically on that side of the line. 

We find we must take up his Cross. We must follow him, even though we realize that we may therefore find ourselves on the opposite side of a chasm separating us from people otherwise closest to us. In the light of the Cross of Christ, we find ourselves freshly evaluating everything, from religious expressiveness to how justice is furthered and how humans may flourish in a fallen world. Jesus is telling us in today’s passage that when we take up his Cross, not everybody will necessarily “get” us anymore, because we will think, feel, and live differently — but that’s OK because … 

Identification. … That’s OK because when Jesus’s Cross becomes ours, ours becomes his: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Matthew 10:40). As a corollary, Jesus takes everything we do for him as being done to him directly, even the cup of cold water we offer to one of his little ones (Matthew 10:42). The risk, then, of rejection by others, even of those closest to us, is more than offset by acceptance by him and by the new family of other so-called rejects. 

Later in Matthew, Jesus will hint that those of us who have taken up our Cross will unconsciously find that the Cross we have taken up has led us to serve him in the hungry, the imprisoned, the naked, and the sick (Matthew 25:31–46). And because we have become as much his as he has become ours, we will rejoice to hear him say, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34b). 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Adapted from "auntie helping with a cup of water" by thepinkpeppercorn is licensed under CC BY 2.0