Matthew 10:24-39
June 25, 2017
I.
Jesus sends his disciples out into the world on a mission. He continues to give them advice about what they should expect. He does not come across here as the sweet, nice, easy-going guy we sometimes like to assume he is.
Yes, Jesus is about compassion, peace, justice, healing, and love. We might think that this would make him really popular. In actuality it often has exactly the opposite effect. In a world based on violence, injustice, fear, anger, enmity, exploitation, and selfishness, Jesus’ approach is deeply subversive and threatening to the established order. From the government on down to the family, Jesus and his disciples are at best ignored and dismissed as irrelevant dreamers. At worst, of course, they are assaulted for being blasphemous traitors, which is what Jesus himself was executed for.
First, he says that if they let it be known that they are his disciples, they will accused of the same things he is accused of. Guilt by association. If the establishment is calling him a demon-possessed traitor and disturber of the peace, then the disciples should expect the same assumptions to be made about them, and to be treated accordingly.
Secondly, he reminds them that no matter what happens, God’s truth prevails in the end. No matter how bad it gets for them, nothing can change God’s love and nothing can change what is real. Everything gets revealed in the end. God takes care of every little bird; God will certainly take care of these disciples who have thrown themselves into ministry, trusting in Jesus totally.
And if they acknowledge Jesus’ truth and goodness now, God will recognize and accept and welcome them into God’s own truth and goodness in the end. But to deny Jesus is to deny the truth of God’s love, and thus end up separate from God, which is hell.
Then he says something very disturbing, that he has not come to bring peace but deadly conflict that will reach even into families, breaking them apart in hostility and violence. The consequence of Jesus’ ministry is a kind of civil war. And the church experiences this in many places in the form of persecution.
We don’t understand this because we know that the message is the truth that God is love, there is a better way to live, it doesn’t have to be this way… that God has established equality, justice, healing, and peace at the heart of our life… that there is true and eternal joy out there and we can know it….
But instead of being welcomed, the disciples are lynched, arrested, assaulted, chased out of town, and vilified. People, it turns out — especially the people in charge — prefer their familiar prison to freedom. They prefer a disease they know to a healing they can’t imagine. They would rather leave well-enough alone than risk trusting in a new vision. They refer the “tried-and-true” routine, regimented, traditions, habits, structures, laws, and arrangements, to this weird talk about compassion, community, forgiveness, and welcome. That all just looks like chaos to them, a recipe for disaster.
II.
Jesus concludes this section by restating his familiar idea, “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
In other words, the Lord is preparing them for a very difficult time. For his good news doesn’t mean that the clouds part and the sun comes out in a nice, gradual fashion. The new life doesn’t happen that way. It’s not God’s fault. Rather, our separation from God, our falling into ego-centricity and selfishness, our ignorance and blindness are so profound and pervasive that it doesn’t just clear up incrementally.
A more comprehensive transformation is involved. In effect a person has to figuratively, symbolically die. The old self has to pass away so the new self, the original, destined true self, may emerge. You have to lose your life before you can find it. You have to let go of everything you have ever known as “you” in order that you may become the new you you have always been deep inside but didn’t know it.
That’s why the initiation/transformation ritual for becoming a follower of Jesus is baptism. I know in the domesticated form we practice baptism doesn’t look that dangerous; but the early church practiced full immersion, which made it way more clear that this was about going down into the water and symbolically drowning before being hauled up into the light as a new person. You leave your old existence dead in the water. Baptized people were then clothed in white robes to symbolize the newness and purity of their souls.
This is the part people found it hard to listen to. They might be willing to try a new, cool religion. But they were more reticent about signing up for “dying”… even if it did resolve in “rebirth”. Because your new self necessarily has radically different values, habits, practices, ways of thinking, and ways of relating to people, even in your society and family.
Regular society insisted that there was a pecking order, with some superior and others inferior, where some had money and power and prestige, but most did not. But Jesus preaches equality and reversal. In regular society problems are supposedly solved by threats, coercion, violence, incarceration, punishment, and even killing wrongdoers; but the followers of Jesus are all about forgiveness. In regular society you worked to make somebody else rich, you were in competition with others for scarce resources, and you had to protect and hoard what you got for yourself and your own people. But followers of Jesus share generously with each other and with people in need, even to the point sometimes of having all things in common and not having private property at all.
III.
In other words, followers of Jesus live like they are from some other planet, some other dimension even; some place where there is more than enough for everyone, where healing is available to all, where no one is excluded, rejected, outcast, or diminished, and where all are equal before God in joy and gratitude. They are from God’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, and they implement in their own lives here and now the goodness and reality they knew was true for all.
Unfortunately, this really ticked people off. Especially enraged were those who were getting wealthy and powerful off the fear, division, anger, shame, work, and disease of everyone else. The followers of this guy Jesus? They were labeled heretics, blasphemers, traitors, terrorists, fools, hopeless idealists, cannibals, and probably “snowflakes” as well, which seems to be the most popular epithet on Facebook these days (even though I am not completely sure what it means).
I wonder what Jesus would make of an established, unpersecuted, popular, rich, powerful and connected church. I wonder what he would make of a church that really did bring a sword into the world because it was itself making war, punishing “sinners” and heretics, dividing families, perpetrating genocide and slavery. Maybe seeing that future is what has Jesus really depressed. Because for too much of its history, the church has been about complicity in horrible violence against just the people whom Jesus loves and identifies with most: the poor, strangers, the outcast and disenfranchised, children, women, the sick.…
I wonder what Jesus would make of us. Are we blinded by our idols and lies, preaching a safe and domesticated version of Christianity that merely makes people shrug if they even hear it over the tsunami of noise we are inundated with every day?
Perhaps my favorite quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is: “When Jesus calls a person, he bids them come and die.” I’ve never yet seen that on a church message board. But Jesus says it is the only way to find your real life: to lose your false one.
I suspect Jesus would also gently suggest that if we really experienced what he is teaching there would be no way to keep it a secret. Not only would we be compelled to talk about it, we would be even more compelled to live differently. And spark the kind of reaction he outlines here.
IV.
The Lord finally softens his warnings a bit with the encouragement that, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,” drawing this powerful connection between the disciples, himself, and God. Showing that not only are the disciples not alone, not only is God with them, but they are God’s agents. To be a disciple, then, is to be Jesus, it is to in a sense “be” God, or at least have God shine in you.
This is what the church has largely forgotten. Jesus may be sending us as sheep among wolves, but we are not alone and on our own. He is the Shepherd and the Lamb; and it’s the sheep who inherit the Earth. Those who do receive us also receive God! Which makes us the carriers of this divine virus!
To use an illustration from biology: When a caterpillar goes into metamorphosis, it doesn’t just sprout wings in the chrysalis. The whole caterpillar deconstructs and turns into mush. In the midst of this process there are within the caterpillar what biologists call “imaginal cells.” These contain the blueprints and coding for the butterfly. At first, the caterpillar’s immune system attacks these cells. But eventually they reproduce and overwhelm the defenses of the caterpillar, which is disintegrating anyway. Then they use the raw material of the former caterpillar to construct the new butterfly.
My point here is that those who follow Jesus and live according to his teachings and example, are like the imaginal cells of God’s Kingdom. At first, if we are doing our job and expressing Jesus’ life, we get attacked and we become the cause of division. But we are the future. We are Christ-in-the-world. In Christ we carry the blueprints of the world to come. We bear the inevitable, necessary destiny of God’s creation.
So it is up to us to let go of our old, caterpillar selves, and embrace our new, butterfly selves. It is up to us to express in our own lives and relationships the love, justice, peace, equality forgiveness, and healing we see in Jesus Christ. That has to shine through us. It is up to us to welcome the stranger. It is up to us to form a community that cares for the needy and the despised, that avoids violence and coercion, that cherishes the Earth and all of life. Not just a congregation, though that’s where it starts… but if we are going to follow Jesus’ images of salt and leaven our influence has to permeate the whole culture making it more generous, caring, accepting, gentle, and just.
Yeah, it’s going to be rough going. The culture wants to stay selfish, unequal, unjust, and violent. But that is not our future. That is not God’s reality. That is not what is true. That is not what Jesus is about.
So it can’t be what we are about either. We are, always and only, about the infinite and amazing and miraculous love of God, revealing itself in everything which God has made, which is to say everything. That’s the inclusive, all embracing gospel that we express, no matter what.
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