Luke 12:49-56
August 17, 2025
There is an article in this month’s Christian
Century magazine written in tribute of Walter Brueggemann, now of blessed
memory. Brueggemann was a renowned biblical scholar of Old Testament,
particularly in hearing and interpreting the prophets. He was a prolific
writer, and his book The Prophetic Imagination was required reading when
I was in seminary, and I believe that it is still required in many seminaries
today. The author of this article, Jason Edwards, wrote that “Brueggemann was
not interested in easy answers or sanitized interpretations. … He did not ask
the biblical text to be safe; he asked it to speak. And when it did, he
stayed.” [i]
He did not ask the biblical text to
be safe; he asked it to speak. The text from the gospel of Luke that is before
us this morning is one that I am asking to speak, even though our initial
response may be wait, what? What did it say? What did Jesus say? Wait, what?
Last week, we heard Jesus tell those
around him not to worry, not to be afraid. We heard that it was God’s good
pleasure to give us the kingdom. We heard that when the master comes home, he
will have the servants sit at the table and he will serve them. And this week,
as we move to these last closing verses in chapter 12, we read that Jesus now
declares that he “came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were
already kindled!”
Jesus states that he has a baptism
with which to be baptized and that he is under great stress until it is
completed. Then he declares that the people think he has come to bring peace on
earth. But he has not come to bring peace. He has come to bring division.
Households will be divided. Families will be divided. Fathers against sons.
Mothers against daughters. Mothers-in-law against daughters-in-law. He has come
not to bring peace on earth but division. Wait? What?
So this is what Jesus, and the text
are speaking. But what does it mean? Jesus says that he has a baptism with
which to be baptized and that he is under great stress until that baptism is
accomplished. We know that he has already been baptized in the Jordan by John.
That is not the baptism that he referring to. The larger context of these
verses is that Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem. He has set his face toward
that city, which means that he is moving toward the cross. There is no turning
back. This die has been cast. So, the baptism that Jesus is referring to is not
one of immersion but crucifixion. The baptism for which he in great stress is
waiting is his own death into new life. I imagine he was under stress. Terrible
stress.
The
Greek word translated as “stress” in my version of the Bible means a
“squeezing.” It is a pressing in. Jesus is being squeezed and pressed. Pretty
accurate way of describing stress isn’t it? When I am under an enormous amount
of stress I feel as though I am being squeezed and pushed and pressed from all
sides. Jesus is feeling this. He has been trying all along to show the people
that the kingdom of God is already in their midst. Now he tells them that it’s
obvious. They can look at a rain cloud
and realize it is going to rain. They can feel the south wind blowing and know
that the heat will be upon them. But what’s right in front of their eyes, they
can’t see! Why can’t they just get it?
So Jesus has not come to bring
peace. He brings division. These words may disturb and perturb us, but hasn’t this
has been true all along? Jesus was run out of his hometown. His own mother and
brothers think he has gone off the deep end. He’s ticked off just about every
religious leader he’s encountered. He has confused and scared people. He heals
one person only to anger another person with that same healing. Jesus assures
the people who surround him of God’s love, but he also tells them that God is
more than just words on scrolls or rules to be adhered to. God is in their
midst. God is working among them. The power of God’s Holy Spirit is blowing new
life into what was dead. Everything is shaken, stirred, changed. Because when
God comes, things happen, life changes. Who said that would be easy or
painless? Who said that the peace of God would be a warm fuzzy? Who said that
the coming of the kingdom would make everybody feel just great? Not Jesus. The
coming of the kingdom brings abundant life. But that life comes out of death,
it comes out of change. And change can and does bring division.
When I used to read these words, it
seemed like Jesus wanted to bring division. That was his sole purpose and plan.
And that just seemed counter intuitive and just plain counter to all the Good
Shepherd images of Jesus that I have been clinging to since childhood. But as
scholar and writer Debie Thomas wrote, and I paraphrase, too often we interpret
these words of Jesus as being prescriptive. That he is telling people that this
is what he does, and we read into it that this is what they should do as well.
But Jesus is not prescribing. He is describing. These are the consequences of
his coming into the world. These are the consequences of his preaching and
teaching. These are the consequences of people accepting his word – or not.
Division may not be his intent, but division is what happens.
Yet even as I understand that Jesus
was being descriptive instead of prescriptive that doesn’t make these words of
division any easier for me to hear or to take to heart. When I hear these words
speaking from scripture, I don’t want to stay as Brueggemann did. I don’t want
to stay because they seem to fly in the face of the idea of unity that I have
been taught all my life. We are to be one, unified, together, no matter what.
No matter what our external differences may be, we are one. But Jesus was not
talking about unity in these verses, was he? He was saying that the consequence
of his coming, of his teaching and preaching, of him just existing, was not
unity but division. The crowds around him were not joining hands and singing Kum
Ba Yah. But that’s what I thought we were supposed to do! Right?! We are
all just supposed to get along.
But following Jesus, following the
gospel can divide you from people that you love. It provokes a crisis in those who take it seriously. By crisis, I mean
that point when you cannot unsee what you have seen. You cannot go back to
where you were before. Following Jesus and taking the gospel seriously evokes
cognitive dissonance – that tension between what is and what should be. The
gospel makes me question what I know and see and understand because I get a
glimpse of the difference and the distance between what is and what God wants. And
sometimes in that crisis, in that cognitive dissonance, unity is not possible –
not if it means unifying around what is contrary to the gospel. When I let the
scripture speak, when I remember that Jesus’ words, these stories, these
difficult, challenging texts are more than just words on a page, but a
living gospel, I am disturbed and disrupted and definitely not at peace with
myself. I am definitely not safe, and nothing about following Jesus feels easy
or light. Maybe you feel the same.
I
suspect that if we’ve been paying attention, we should already know this about
our faith, about our call. We should already know the division that Jesus
speaks of. We know that following Jesus doesn’t always win us friends. Speaking
the truth in love doesn’t prevent rejection of that truth. Loving others as
Jesus loved us does not make them love us back. Following Jesus means risk.
Trusting that the message of the gospel is not just about ten easy steps to get
to heaven but is instead a message of radical reversal. Following Jesus,
letting the gospel speak is risky and challenging and scary. The gospel isn’t
nice, and it isn’t easy, and it is not safe.
But
the gospel changes how we understand love, success, power and greatness, and
preaching that gospel message might
not bring people rushing to the pews on a Sunday morning. But if we take Jesus’ words seriously, we do
it anyway. We love anyway. We give anyway. We follow anyway; we risk anyway because
being a disciple isn’t just about being nice. It’s rarely nice. It means change
and pain and division and stress. Jesus
was stressed. He was being squeezed and
pressed and pushed and pulled. But he never wavered from the path to the cross.
So as hard as it is to hear these difficult and challenging words, because they
aren’t what we expect or want, we must hear them. We must take them seriously. Even
if they make us pause and say, wait? What? Even though it causes great stress,
we, in the words of the author of Hebrews, keep running the race before us. None
of it is easy, but it was never meant to be easy. None of it is safe, but it
was never meant to be safe. But we are called to keep running, to keep persevering,
to keep following Jesus because following Jesus has never mattered more than it
does right now. Following Jesus, letting the scripture speak, is what could
make all the difference. And if there is a word of comfort in these difficult
passages it comes from Hebrews. We are not the only ones who faced these
challenges, who lived in this tension, who felt this squeezing stress. We are
surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, by all the faithful who persevered,
never knowing where the race would take them. But they raced anyway. That is
the good news. That is the gospel. Thanks be to God.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Alleluia.”
Amen.
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