Abstract
The books of the New Testament weren’t written for us. They were written for people who believed they would most likely have to suffer like Christ and be persecuted for his sake. They were fully expecting to be handed over to the courts, betrayed, tortured, put to death.
There would be conflict, and they had to be prepared to face it. Discipleship wasn’t going to be peaceful.
‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?’ Luke has Jesus asking, in our gospel passage this morning (Luke 12:49–56).
‘No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two, and two against three; they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother’, and so on and so forth.
Luke had already made it clear that discipleship would involve conflict. He’d mentioned Simeon. Jesus would offer salvation to everyone. He would be a light to the Gentiles as well to Israel. But as a result Jesus would be rejected, and there would be conflict.
‘This child is destined to be a sign which will be rejected’, Simeon said to Mary, ‘and you too will be pierced to the heart … many in Israel will stand or fall because of him.’
So we’re told that the coming of Jesus will involve conflict, pain, and suffering.
Jesus himself will be rejected, betrayed, tortured, crucified. The early Christian community will be persecuted. There’ll even be conflict between those who follow Jesus, and those who don’t. And this conflict will divide families.
So discipleship won’t be a walk in the park. It will be dangerous and costly.
Jesus knew this, and said so. ‘I came to bring fire to the earth,’ he said. ‘Fire’ meaning ‘judgment’.
‘I have a baptism with which to be baptized,’ he said; ‘baptism’ meaning ‘death’.
So there will be suffering. The days ahead will be dark, troubled, aggressive.
This was the message being told to the first century followers of Christ to help them cope with the challenge of discipleship. They are dynamic, strong words, intended to empower the first Christians as they faced persecution and death.
They are words written for those people back then, not for us now.
But if they were here today, with us, listening to words they themselves had listened to almost two thousand years ago, I wonder what they would make of us?
After all they went through for their faith, what would they think of us?
Would they be blown away by the fact that, unlike them, very few of us are actually suffering for the sake of Christ? And that none of us have been crucified for our faith, or are ever likely to be crucified?
So how can we make these first-century challenges relevant to ourselves?
Perhaps we could pick up on one distinctive theme about discipleship, and that is ‘If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind.’
That is, to be a disciple of Christ, we must set aside self-interest. Guarding our own interests isn’t to be our goal. Rather is our goal to give up our interests for others.
And if we decide to go this way, then there’s sure to be conflict. Our self-interest can be all-consuming. It can dominate us. And there’s conflict right there.
There’s an image—a very powerful image—which helps us imagine what this ‘giving up of ourselves’ is like. It’s the image of ‘being small’.
There’s the parable of the mustard seed, the seed which is smaller than all the other seeds, but produces a plant which is greater.
The feeding miracles tell us how God takes small things and makes something great out of them—a small quantity of bread, a small quantity of fish, which feeds four or five thousand people.
There’s the story of the man who was rich and is told that the only thing he can do is get rid of his riches—and be small.
The only way in is to be perfect, and if you want that, then you must get rid of it all. To enter the age to come, you must have nothing. Otherwise you’d be like a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle. They’d be too much of you to get through.
Jesus comes into Jerusalem small—without glory, status, pomp, success. None of that. He’s not on a war-horse or in a chariot. He’s on a donkey. Powerless, after having relinquished all traces of self-interest.
Death to self. Death to self-interest. Now that’s a challenge for us here and now. Conflict enough for us. But how can we get rid of our self-interest, and still have a life to live? Look after Number One. How can we go against that?
Maybe we could start by getting rid of pretenses—all that stuff with which we clothe ourselves which is not really ‘us’, but a fabrication we concoct so as to make ourselves look big. And once we’ve got rid of all the bling, the ‘bigness’ around ourselves, we’ll be free from the self-absorption that stops us relating genuinely to others.
But this won’t come naturally. It’s a process which will give us strife. It will create conflict for us.
So what Simeon said will come true for us as well. Jesus will bring us conflict. It’s not the whole truth that he’s the prince of peace.
When those early Christians heard the words ‘Whoever loses their life for Christ’s sake will find it,’ they knew it meant losing their lives during the persecutions.
It’s unlikely to mean that for most of us today. None of us is likely to be destroyed in the way the first Christians were destroyed. But what it can mean is that it’s through the destruction of all that is false and presumptive about us that we’ll be free us to appreciate and love others in all their circumstances.
We ask for the will to do this through the One who diminished himself from all that he was that we might be raised to all we can be, that same One to whom we offer all praise, thanksgiving, glory and honour, today and forever.