Trinity 3
Trinity 3
25 June 2023
The Reverend Ed Green
What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.
What can it mean when we hear Jesus telling us that he hasn’t come to bring peace? Whatever happened to “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you?” The idea of the Peace of Christ is so important to our Gospel in general that this morning’s Gospel reading can be seriously challenging. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;” says the Lord, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Apparently, various familial relationships will be broken down on account of Jesus and we’re all going to hate each other. [What a tremendously helpful Gospel to read when we have newlyweds in the room!]
All this fighting with one another, especially within families, sounds like it might really be an example of sin, but Jesus is saying that it will happen because of him. So what is going on here? Does Jesus actually want division? Is this about dividing the sheep from the goats? Or perhaps this is a sort of acceptance of the inevitability of human self-centeredness and malice. We are certainly called to accept the reality of sin, even as we fight against it. But to hear Jesus talk about this division as something he has come to bring is different. Perhaps some people on hearing this might try to rationalise it as follows: in order to enable God’s grace to enter into our lives, we need some strife for it to overcome, or it wouldn’t be anything notably different to the norm.
But such a line of reasoning denies the Gospel message of Christ who came among us, suffered, died and rose again. Fighting and division is not a means to achieve God’s grace and peace. “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me,” says Jesus. The struggle of navigating our way through this life, encumbered by the obstacles of fighting and division and conflict is part of what he means by this. But we do not need to worry that we will walk this path alone, because he is with us. And sometimes, we are able to see a visible sign of his companionship in our relationships with others. [This morning we celebrate one such visible sign, the marriage between Shanti and James which took place yesterday. They are a sign to one another of Christ’s companionship - but not only that, their union is a sign of it to the world.]
“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Taking up our cross and following Jesus is not an easy thing - but it also is not a lonely thing. More than that, when we walk together, following Jesus, we know the ending - we know that Christ rose again for us, and that he will give us a share in that resurrection. It’s easy to lose sight of that fact, and focus on the cross-carrying and death. But when we have a fellow-traveller on our journey we can build each other up and help each other to carry the load, always remembering that death is not the final word. When we hear good news in the dark, we can tell it to one another in the light. When we hear something whispered, we can proclaim it to one another from the rooftops.
In this life there are many metrics which can be used to calculate somebody’s value. Perhaps most obviously, money. In this particular city for many people it might be grades, or which degrees people have. There are people who are seen to be worth a great deal - and, regrettably, there are people who are perceived to be worth very little at all. But in the eyes of God, every person and every creature is precious.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father.”
God knows all of us intimately because he created us. But we don’t have that capacity - it is beyond our grasp to know intimately everybody around us. But that is why we have the gifts of community, and of friendship and family. Sometimes family means our biological relatives, and sometimes it means people who have found one another and become family later on, but it is the gift through which come to know just a few people intimately, in imitation of the way in which Jesus can know us. And of course, one of the ways in which people find one another is through romance, and marriage. It is not without its problems in the contemporary world, but it is no accident that historically one of the main metaphors for our relationship with Jesus has been that of a marriage, with Jesus as the bridegroom, and the church as the bride.
Marriage is the perfect exemplar of the ministry which Jesus calls us to today. “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” Because marriage, properly understood, is both deeply private and prolifically public. It is an intimate form of knowing, usually characterised by living together in a private home, and by lots of time spent together. But it is also a public performance, a display that can be seen by all of the unquenchable love of which we are capable, because we have been made that way by Love himself. “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.” It is worth remembering the famous statement of St John: “God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.”
So, whether we are married or not, whether our family is big or small, and whether we were born into it or found it later on, we have to reckon with the statement I referred to at the beginning. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;” says the Lord, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” The sword, the battle which Jesus describes, which will apparently drive families apart is not some test to see who is worthy of his love. Sometimes, in our fallen world, divisions are almost inevitable. When we consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus our focus is turned not to our divisions, but to our places of unity.
Every living creature is precious in the eyes of God. There are no exceptions to this. His infinite capacity for love is something that most of us wish we could tap into. And the really amazing thing is that we can. We may struggle to love everybody all at once (even though Jesus can do that). But when we love - any kind of love - we take that all-encompassing, intimate knowledge and make it public, and we take the essence of our community into the intimacy of our home. [This is the glorious mission that Shanti and James have taken upon themselves this weekend. It is often said by theologians that the ministers of the Sacrament of Matrimony are the spouses themselves rather than the priest. But I prefer to go one step further and say that the spouses are the sacrament. No pressure.] So throughout our lives, and in all our close relationships, whatever shape they may take, Jesus doesn’t ask us to focus on the sword he’s bringing. We needn’t be distracted by division. “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light;” says the Lord, “and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.