“Ambushed by Resurrection”
Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Matthew 10:34-39
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
6/25/23
Now these are the commandments, the regulations, and the case laws that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you to follow in the land you are entering to possess, 2 so that you will fear the Lord your God by keeping all his regulations and his commandments that I am commanding you—both you and your sons and daughters—all the days of your life and so that you will lengthen your life. 3 Listen to them, Israel! Follow them carefully so that things will go well for you and so that you will continue to multiply exactly as the Lord, your ancestors’ God, promised you, in a land full of milk and honey.
4 Israel, listen! Our God is the Lord! Only the Lord!
5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your being, and all your strength. 6 These words that I am commanding you today must always be on your minds.7 Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are sitting around your house and when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are getting up. 8 Tie them on your hand as a sign. They should be on your forehead as a symbol. 9 Write them on your house’s doorframes and on your city’s gates. (Deuteronomy 6:1-9 - CEB)
34 “Don’t think that I’ve come to bring peace to the earth. I haven’t come to bring peace but a sword. 35 I’ve come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 People’s enemies are members of their own households.
37 “Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me. Those who love son or daughter more than me aren’t worthy of me. 38 Those who don’t pick up their crosses and follow me aren’t worthy of me.39 Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives because of me will find them.”(Matthew 10:34-39 – CEB)
The New Testament passage we just read appears in both Matthew and Luke. And to be honest, it always feels like an ambush.
“I haven’t come to bring peace, but a sword.” What happened to the Prince of Peace?
“Those who love father or mother more than me aren’t worthy of me.” What happened to Honor your father and mother?
To be worthy of me, pick up your cross. Didn’t Rome use crucifixion to manipulate human behavior through that very public display of inhumanity?
To really live your life, says Jesus, release your death grip on it.
With all this, he undermines some of the most fundamental tenets that powerful and affluent cultures celebrate and enshrine as inalienable rights. Things like: The world is your oyster, so grab all the gusto you can! Control your own destiny!
I think Jesus knows that self-serving mottos like these can lead to trouble. If I claim some divine right to grab all the gusto I can get, I inevitably keep grabbing, even when it means grabbing more than my fair share. And the more I consume, the more insatiable I become. Or as singer/songwriter Joe Pug says in one of his many insightful songs, “The more I buy the more I’m bought; and the more I’m bought, the less I cost.”1
Materialism and consumption become drugs like any other. We just keep buying and chasing the unattainable high of lasting satisfaction. And all we really get is inebriated with entitlement. And that entitlement costs us connection to and compassion for the people and the earth around us.
Similarly, when I claim divine right to complete control of my own destiny, or my own narrative, I will have to control everyone else, because my life cannot be distanced from the lives around me. Trying to control my situation almost always results in me trying to force my desires, my fears, my power-hungry ego onto others. And if I get my way, by whatever means, only then do I believe that God is in the heavens, and all is right with the world.
Into all my efforts to manipulate and rationalize advantages for myself, Jesus keeps saying, emphatically, Allen, stop it! To be as alive as you think you want to be, you’ll have to, in some way, lose your life.
I’ve never much liked this passage, but bless my heart, the fact that it challenges me to self-emptying love is what makes it gospel for me. And because these words do feel stark at first, I have to stop and remember that Jesus offers them, as he does everything else, as an expression of love, not of exasperation or anger. After spending enough time with this text, and trusting that it does, in truth, convey grace, I begin to hear it revealing a purpose that aims to heal and make whole. So, instead of stark and diminishing, it becomes a source of light and life.
When we open ourselves to the possibility of loving intent in Jesus’ telling us that he comes not “to bring peace, but a sword,” I think the Spirit reminds us of the wider witness of scripture. And we recall that, as the Christ, Jesus is not out to endrelationships. He aims to re-new and strengthen them.
When a broken bone doesn’t set correctly, an orthopedic surgeon may have to re-break the bone and set it properly. The intentional break and re-set allow the particular bone and, thus, the whole limb, or even the whole body to be restored to proper alignment and to full strength and function.
So, Jesus is not talking about severing ties with the people we love. He’s talking about re-ordering all of our ties. He’s talking about loving all things, even the people closest to us, from an entirely new perspective.
In The Wisdom Jesus, the book our Monday night group is reading, author Cynthia Bourgeault encourages her readers to recognize Jesus as a kind of human ground-zero for wisdom teaching. The wisdom tradition had been around long before Jesus, and yet Jesus embodied, as no one before him, the depth and breadth of that tradition through which humankind learns to experience God—and not simply to experience, but, as Bourgeault says, to know God. Now, knowledge of God is not like one’s knowledge of an academic subject or of a skill or trade. We can’t fully know God any more than a barnacle can know us.
The wisdom tradition teaches the deep knowingness of awareness, of connection, of the com-passion of shared joy and shared suffering. And in the wisdom tradition, all relationship begins and ends with God. All true intimacy is, ultimately, with God because all true relationship is, ultimately, an expression ofGod.2 To enter relationships with other human beings, and with the entire Creation, from a perspective of deep humility and mutuality is to live in a radically new way, and that re-ordering begins with the grateful surrender of the previous perspective.
Now, that previous perspective is neither useless nor wrong. It’s simply inadequate for a more mature faith. “When I was a child,” says Paul, “I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I [am growing up], I’ve put an end to childish things.” (1Cor. 13:11) There’s no judgment of the previous perspective. We just reach the point at which we’re capable of deeper love and deeper trust.
When my children were born, I cut the umbilical cords. With each birth, the experience of pregnancy was complete, and a brand new set of relationships began. Relationships of unspeakable joy, gratitude, and heartache. Relationships of ongoing bewilderment and discovery. Relationships in which we began a continual process of coming together, pulling apart, and coming together anew. My relationships with my son and daughter haven’t always been easy, or even pleasant, and I’ve never known anyone for whom that wasn’t the case. Since our son became a dad, though, there’s been a new beginning, a new intimacy because we’re now sharing the experience of fatherhood and a love for this spellbinding new life that is growing, changing, and becoming, right before our eyes. I felt a similar joy just eight days ago when I got to marry my daughter to her now husband.
Like all relationships, these new relationships will experience turmoil. Things as we know them now will end. And after each experience of change or loss, the Spirit lays us at our Mother’s breast, freshly re-formed, and capable of new depths of understanding and trust.
Resurrection is our tradition’s metaphor for the new life of intimacy, through Christ, with God and with all Creation. And Resurrection does ambush us. And with each ambush, it shines God’s unassailable light a little further into the darkness revealing the next steps in the path of wisdom, the path of holiness, and, yes, even the path of peace which Jesus may say he has not come to bring, but which he does, nonetheless, faithfully bring.
2Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming the Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Shambhala, Boulder. 2008.
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