FINDINGS V By Harry T. Cook
     
 

Proper 8 - A - June 29, 2014

Matthew 10: 34-42     

   

  

Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
6/23/14

 

 

 

Matthew 10: 34-42   

[Jesus said to his disciples] "You should understand that I did not come here to bring peace, rather a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. One's enemies live in his own house. Those who love their parents more than me are not worthy of me, and those who love their children more than me are not worthy of me. And those who do not take their cross and follow behind me are not worthy of me. Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will find them.  The one who accepts you accepts me, and the one who accepts me accepts him who sent me. The one who accepts a prophet as a prophet will himself be treated like a prophet; the same goes for a virtuous person. And the person who makes so modest a gesture as giving a cup of cool water to some one of the kind that does not matter to most people, and that after the nature of a Jesus follower, will not go unrewarded." 

(Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

We will be with Matthew pretty much now until Advent. Thus we will be encountering a number of sayings generally attributed to Jesus, many of which may have had their written origins in the Q document and their oral ones in earlier traditions. Of course, we do not know if any Jesus ever said any of the words that appear in rubric or are enclosed with quotation marks. What we do know is how the gospelers wanted during the last third of the first century CE to portray the Jesuses of the first third. We know something, too, of what was in Matthew's mind and/or those responsible with him for the 28 chapters' worth of narrative. We know nothing directly of any Jesus or what any Jesus might have said.

 

We begin with a debate about the proper translation of the first sentence in this passage: "You should understand that I did not come here to bring peace, rather a sword." Among the dissenters from this translation have been the late Ernest W. Saunders (a graduate school professor of mine), W.F. Albright and C.P. Mann. The latter two are inclined to this kind of translation: "Do not think that I have come to impose peace on earth by force (of war)." You can check out their rationale for doing so at pages 130-131 of Vol. 26 of the Anchor Bible, but unless you have an hour to spend wrestling with the Greek with which they wrestled, never mind.

 

The sword is a metaphor for dividing and division. Jesus by virtue of his humanistic ethical teaching is an agent of division, because the demands of that ethic are rigorous, as in "Love your enemy," "Give up your shirt as well as your coat" and "Forgive endlessly." Such an ethic has the potential of division. Many of us can well remember how that ethic divided families during the Vietnam war. The comic strip "Doonesbury" chronicled that division in graphic terms. It was, as the passage goes on to say, a generational conflict: between son and father, daughter and mother, etc.

 

That potential of division leads directly to the admonition to place one's primary loyalty in Jesus himself. The Lukan parallel at 14:26 seems even more fierce than Matthew's "Those who love their parents more than me are not worthy of me, and those who love their children more than me are not worthy of me." Luke: "Should any one come to me and does not hate his mother and father . . ." "Hate" is not necessarily the best translation of the Greek at that place: μισεί, which is more likely to convey a modified kind of indifference or "relative disregard for one thing in comparison to another," as lexicographer G. Abbott-Smith wrote -- a timely and appropriate preference for one or the other, in other words.

 

Eventually a child matures and leaves the parents' home to establish an adult life and grows to prize that independence. That does not mean that the adult child hates the parents. A man or woman who answers a vocation to a cloistered life does not thereby hate secular life, but puts a higher priority on the religious life. That is the sense of μισεί here. The idea is that one who decides to embrace the Jesus ethic as a way of living really needs to do so fully, and if it causes a break with a family, so be it. If a follower of Jesus finds it necessary to love and forgive one who has been -- or has been perceived as -- an enemy of the family, and the family objects. So be it. That is the sacrificial aspect of embracing Jesus and his way. The specter of crucifixion of those who engaged in that kind passive resistance gave such resistance its cruciform symbolism.

 

The use of the "cross" metaphor this early in the Matthean narrative surely reflects the depth to which Jesus' execution as remembered by the ongoing community (or fabricated by them to explain his death) is a core theme of the New Testament. Together with the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), they are the two motifs that resonate throughout the literature.

 

So what about this? "The one who accepts you accepts me, and the one who accepts me accepts him who sent me. The one who accepts a prophet as a prophet will himself be treated like a prophet; the same goes for a virtuous person." This may be the claim of the late first century CE Matthean communities that their elected or appointed leaders are the legitimate representatives of both Jesus and Yahweh -- almost a kind of apostolic succession image: Messiah to messiah's prophet; messiah's prophet to people acting like the prophet, i.e. virtuously or in a righteous way.

 

The placement of this verse ("And the person who makes so modest a gesture as giving a cup of cool water to some one of the kind who does not matter to most people, and that after the nature of a Jesus follower, will not go unrewarded.") seems out of place here. There appears to be no antecedent to what the NSRV calls "these little ones," however, it can be found at Mark 9:36 where soon thereafter the "cup of cool water" is mentioned at 9:41. Maybe later editing of the Matthean text was a bit muddled.

 

One homiletic opportunity presented in the consideration of the passage at hand is the unpacking of the Greek word μισεί as translated above as an act of prioritizing. A reason-based secular humanist understanding of Judaism or Christianity does not by its nature summon a person to an all-or-nothing commitment. One is not required to give every last discretionary dollars to the shul or to the church. He or she can give some of it to the symphony, the opera, the United Fund and the diversions of entertainment and vacation. What is ideally sought is a balance in life among the several demands on a person's time and energy.

 

Commonsense, however, requires a listing of clear priorities and reasonable adherence to them.

 

* * * * *

 

"You should understand that I did not come here to bring peace, rather a sword." This is not a happy text. It speaks of division and discord among people who should be happy together, i.e. a family or community organized around common principles. The text is attributed to the one whose birth was said to bring peace, good will to men. Which is it? How can it be both?

 

Part of what surely persuaded and persuades our Jewish sisters and brothers that Jesus of Nazareth was no messiah is that his career did not bring in the reign of shalom. In fact, the effect of his appearance on the public scene brought conflict, and plenty of it. If you believe that Jesus spoke the words about bringing a sword in the place of peace, then you can come to no other conclusion than that the conflict was purposeful.

 

Historically, the consistent mark of the Christian church, which claims its origins in the mythical figure of Jesus, has been and is division:

  • The several centuries of controversy -- some of it violent -- over what was orthodoxy and what was not;
  • The papal intrigues of the 14th century, which featured murder, poisoning and other dark arts;
  • The estrangement and bitterness of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation;
  • The brutal theocracy of John Calvin's Geneva;
  • The crazy quilt of American Protestantism and the specter of Protestants protesting other Protestants;
  • The schism over abolition vs. slavery and
  • The fracturing of church relationships over civil rights, the Vietnam war, the ordination of women and the acceptance (or not) of LGBTQ persons.

Given that religion in all its forms is of human invention, conflict is inevitable. In a dynamic and even prophetic religion division seems likewise inevitable. Martin Luther dealt with it by drawing the proverbial line in the sand: Ich kann nicht anders, he said. Rome dealt with that by excommunicating him. Luther said, in effect, "You can't fire me. I quit." Calvin dealt with division by burning Servetus at the stake.

 

Is it possible that people are more important than ideas? Withal, it seems natural for people to find themselves in community and in communities. Their makeup being of non-robotic humans, no community of any kind can avoid periodic discord.

 

Couples deal with it by continuing to love one another while working out things. Estranged parents and their children do the same. Races, peoples, nations have occasionally done it.

 

The fact remains, though, that the ethical wisdom attributed to Jesus of Nazareth divides us because of its uncompromising and demanding nature. Love your enemy? That saying will start an argument almost anywhere.

 

Doctrine divides because it does not finally proceed from revelation but reason, and people are bound to be in different places intellectually.

 

How to deal with the inevitability of division? One answer is: by managing it. It can be managed by never walking away from the table until some consensus, even a contingent one, is reached. In this respect one thinks of the Mother of All Conflicts, at least in our time: that which has Israel and its Palestinian neighbors facing one another across an abyss of historic distrust and a mutual inability to give so much as an inch.

 

How, one wonders, would the ethical counsel love your enemy work across that abyss? 


Copyright 2014 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at [email protected].