A Hard Saying
I’ve often heard people say they really struggle with the idea of Christians justifying war; I must say that I find myself on these occasions agreeing with the doubters because, quite honestly, I just can’t see any justification for believers supporting war as a course of action. So, how should I answer my fellow believers when they are so convinced and can even show me where Jesus clearly said “Do not think that I have come to bring peace; I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:35). Of course they are quoting this text out of it’s context you may say, and I would agree, but that doesn’t make understanding what Jesus meant any easier.
I’ve been thinking about this problem during the week; the impending withdrawl of the last British troops from Iraq has brought back many of the debates which I had during the build-up to the Iraq war and the sheer dismay I felt at the attitude of many Christians who would not have been out of place during the shameful Crusades of Medieval times! How to begin unpicking this puzzling text then? In what follows I merely offer a suggestion of how it might be understood; I’m sure there are those who will disagree but for some these thoughts may prove helpful – please feel free to comment.
Having introduced the idea of context earlier this seems like a good place to start. Matthew chapter 10 begins with the ‘sending out’ of the disciples to do the work that Jesus has already been doing i.e. proclaiming the kingdom of God. But the narrative soon takes a darker tone as the subject shifts to the reception which they are likely to receive. As I read this I became aware that a subtle shift had taken place; instead of speaking about the immediate response the disciples would receive Jesus is now clearly indicating future events, after his death and resurrection and ascention. The talk is of persecution, of divided loyalties and a choice needing to be made between almost certain death and denial of what one has believed. Even the briefest survey of early church history cle3arly shows that these events did indeed take place and some did deny their faith while others faced painful and cruel death at the hands of both the Jewish authorities, initially, and the Romans.
“Peace, Peace …”
But does any of this context and history, interesting though it undoubtedly is, help me to understand why Jesus would say ‘not peace but a sword’; is he saying that the believers should fight back when they are persecuted, is he indicating that family members will go to war against each other for the sake of the gosped? I don’t think so! Maybe it’s our understanding of peace and ‘a sword’ that isn’t helping here? When I looked at these words again recently I was struck by their similarity to the early chapters of the book of Jeremiah. Throughout the early chapters of Jeremiah’s prophecy he attacks the people’s belief, encouraged by false prophets, that everything is as it should be; they expressed this belief in two ways, firstly by their trust in “the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” and, secondly, by their believing the prophets who prophesied “Peace, peace.” This wasn’t mere wishful thinking, the people had become so accustomed to the blatant injustice and idolatry practiced throughout the nation that they actually believed this was the way things should be; obviously no-one consulted the law or they would surely have seen that their moral and spiritual life was bankrupt! As for the ‘trust’ in the temple, which was little more than a superstition that while the temple still stood God was still ‘with them’, Jeremiah exposed the “den of robbers” which the temple had become (Jer 7) – a phrase which is quoted in Matthew 20 when Jesus cleared the temple.
So Jeremiah speaks God’s judgement on the situation with this refrain occurring several times in quick succession ‘this people says “peace, peace” when there is no peace!’ Each time the phrase occurs it is followed by a litany of sins, injustices and idolatry, and the fearful results of the judgement. I should add here that even at this stage the judgement contains the opportunity for the people to turn away from their sin and return to God.
But what has any of this got to do with Jesus and the text in Matthew you might ask? Well, as I suggested before discussing Jeremish, it may well be that just like the people in Jeremiah’s day we don’t really understand what either peace or judgement (a sword) is . We tend to think of peace as a state ‘without war’ but the biblical view of peace is far richer in meaning than just the absence of war; it is a state of wholeness in which everything is in it’s right and proper place and balance, more like harmony, having multiple components but in the right proportion to make a pleasent sound. As for judgement, we have become so accustomed to the negative view of judgement with all the attendant legal language of sentence and punishment that we have lost sight of the positive aspect i.e. to reveal things for what they truly are so that adjustment can be made and things brought back to what they should be. This can only be done by means of a standard; the idea is of measuring up to determine whether or not things are straight and true.
True Peace
Therefore we can now look at Jesus words again and see if it’s any easier to understand what he’s saying. “Not peace”, on this understanding, would now clearly indicate that Jesus intends his ministry to make a change; he is not interested in preserving the ‘peace’ which saw many excluded socially, economically, politically, and religiously – many were literally excluded from the temple and exploited – while those who held positions of power did nothing to relieve the suffering of the poor but instead heaped up wealth and misused their authority to protect the interests of a socio-political elite. At this point somebody may protest that this all a bit ‘political’ and that surely Jesus did not come to engage in human politics; surely he came to bring salvation from this world not to make our lives more comfortable in it? For now all I would say, because to say much more would be a diversion of some length, is that to hold such a view of life, separated into compartments which can be treated in isolation with some rejected altogether on the grounds that they are ‘this worldly’ and therefore unworthy of Jesus attention or ours, misses the point entirely; such views owe more to Greek philosophy and/or theological developments which accompanied Reformation and, later, Enlightenment thinking; very alien to the situation in first century Palestine. I would need to write an entirely separate piece to really deal with such views properly!
As we noted earlier, true peace the entire life and is a situation where wholeness and harmony exists. But this situation can only really exist in the context of social relationships; withdrawl into meditative solitude, while useful at times, is not the kind of peace the scriptures talk about. If anything, quite the opposite is true with specific days built into the Jewish calendar for restoring everything to it’s proper order; this includes all relationships, with God, with other humans, and with creation itself. Whilst I don’t intend to undertake a lengthy discussion of the ‘sabbath principle’ here it is worth noting the number of times both the prophets and Jesus draw attention to its abuse as a cause of God’s displeasure with the people.
A Sword?
Even having said all this, a sword still seems a strange choice of image, if indeed that’s what it is, for Jesus to use. But again I think we need to adjust or thinking. We can’t deny that even in Jesus time the sword was a symbol of military power; in particular the Roman sword which inthe hands of a trained Roman soldier was a deadly weapon and was feared. But the sword also had other meanings. In Hebrew writings the sword symbolised both God’s word and judgement; in the ministry of prophets the two were often combined and, however harsh they may seem, the words of the prophets (the words of God) were always intended to bring the people back to Torah, the covenantal word of God. So we can summarise by saying that the primary aim of judgement is to correct and restore relationship between God and people, between humans, and between humans and their environment which is God’s creation. This now leaves us with another question: in what way does Jesus bring ‘a sword’? That, I’m afraid, will need to be the subject of another piece which will follow shortly.
