Describing Division
Luke 12.49-56
Luke 12:49-56: Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? 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, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"
Apparently ominous teachings today. At the outset, it is worth considering that there are two major ways of reading Scripture: prescriptive and descriptive. Prescription would be the Bible/God/Jesus telling us what to do. Love God and love your neighbor. Definitely prescriptions. We should/shall do these things, literally and figuratively. Description, on the other hand, is a divinely inspired mirror of how we are already living/thinking/being and often with the suggestion that the emperor might be naked. Did Jesus come to literally divide families, or were families in the early 1st Century CE divided over faith matters? Does God want fathers against sons, or does such division happen as we misappropriate the teachings of Jesus to be divisive? There are certainly more than two ways to read and interact with a text. In this case, consider the opener—fire on earth. We know from the historical record that Jesus was not a successful arsonist, if that was his aim. Perhaps he was offering a poetic image, something figurative then? Fire has become a symbol of torture in our theology, but was an image of absolute refinement, of not only separating dross from metal, but annihilating that same dross. Has Jesus come to purify the earth, to refine the crap out of our politics and piety and relationships? Sounds much more believable as both a prescription and a description, which makes one wonder: if we are not being refined, are we following Jesus or our own projections with divine sanction? Prescription and description can happen at the same time and often strengthen one another.
Returning to division, consider that Jesus seems to be describing, once again, the experience of divided households in the early church, especially just after the failed Jewish revolt and destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Jesus also seems to be referencing Micah 7:
1What misery is mine!
I am like one who gathers summer fruit
at the gleaning of the vineyard;
there is no cluster of grapes to eat,
none of the early figs that I crave.
2 The faithful have been swept from the land;
not one upright person remains.
Everyone lies in wait to shed blood;
they hunt each other with nets.
3 Both hands are skilled in doing evil;
the ruler demands gifts,
the judge accepts bribes,
the powerful dictate what they desire—
they all conspire together.
4 The best of them is like a brier,
the most upright worse than a thorn hedge.
The day God visits you has come,
the day your watchmen sound the alarm.
Now is the time of your confusion.
5 Do not trust a neighbor;
put no confidence in a friend.
Even with the woman who lies in your embrace
guard the words of your lips.
6 For a son dishonors his father,
a daughter rises up against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
a man’s enemies are the members of his own household.
7 But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord,
I wait for God my Savior;
my God will hear me.
The prophet laments the palpable need for some refining: judges are unjust, faithfulness is missing, and people have set their minds towards vengeance and retribution instead of actual justice. The prophet anticipated that the day of the LORD was at hand, God’s reckoning that would refine the wicked in real time and space, through invading empires as necessary. The prophet reasoned that tragedies were wake-up calls for faithfulness and chooses to hope in the LORD (not a feeling, but SMART goal setting with Godly outcomes in mind). Jesus certainly describes his generation this way. He describes his coming as a refining day of the LORD. He prescribes not the division that is happening but hoping in the LORD. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, I suspect that Jesus’ and Micah’s descriptions of the sorry state of the way things are and the need to refine systems hit home and hit hope. Now on to it in our own lives!
“Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.” Except in Texas or San Diego, this is a delightfully predictive adage. Jesus chides the crowd for being able to make associations and correlations between the sky and ensuing weather, between multiple and seemingly disparate variables (as in Freakonomics), but not recognizing the clear opportunities before us to hope in the Lord and seek the refinement of our dross and dregs. The time is at hand—God’s family is near. God has come 90% of the way, so we are asked to move the final 10% now and not wait.
It is extremely unlikely that Jesus is comparing God to a magistrate. Rather, another description. At the time of Jesus, debtors could be sentenced to debtor’s prison and, along with their family, tortured, mal-treated, or forced into indenture until the full debt was resolved. Imagine, as a subsistence farmer, having to borrow seed each year against next year’s harvest just to survive. The inevitable risk is extremely high stakes—failure to borrow means starving and borrowing might mean failure in super-subsistence farming and result in torture or servitude. Unfortunately, this seems to have been a commonplace scenario that Jesus references. Therefore, since the company store owns your soul, seek resolution before the court intervenes and finalizes a known fate that you can still negotiate. If we know to not pay sticker price on a used car or to be impolite to the police or to settle litigation out of court (especially when we are wrong!), we ignore our own wisdom to not engage in the refinement of the world and the hope in God that is at hand. As Martin Luther once said, “How often ‘not now’ becomes never.” Today’s readings are about not waiting until New Year’s or next Lent to live bigger; the time and the opportunity is at hand for each of us!