Isaiah 5:1-7

Resources

1. Andrew Marr, "God's Vineyard" (online article).

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

Resources

1. See last week's (Proper 14C) bibliography on Hebrews.

2. Along with Col. 3:1-2 (which we mentioned several weeks ago), Heb. 12:2 is a passage of which James Alison says in Raising Abel, "a quotation which I hope will become familiar to you," page 41; again quoted on pp. 75 & 189. Being a favorite verse, he quotes it again in The Joy of Being Wrong, p. 229.

The first citation of Heb. 12:2 in Raising Abel comes in the midst of a remarkable chapter on Jesus' perception of God, a perception that the apostles could only begin to understand gradually in light of the resurrection. The basic insight is that God is a God of life; we are so formed in a culture of death that we cannot see that God has nothing to do with our ways of death, other than suffering them in Jesus Christ in order to reveal God's effervescent life. Heb. 12:2 represents a clear statement of this insight for Alison. It is well worth reading that wider context in chapter 2 on "The Living God" (excerpt).

The citation in JBW is excerpted in relation to last week's Gospel (link).

Luke 12:49-56

Exegetical Notes

1. A crucial difference between the Matthean and Lukan parallels is that Matthew's Jesus says he 'doesn't come to bring peace but a sword' (Matt 10:34; Gr. machaira), while Luke's Jesus says he 'doesn't come to bring peace but rather division' (Luke 12:51; Gr. diamerismos). Luke goes on to use the participial form of the verb that matches his noun: diamerizo, "divided," while Matthew uses the verb dichazo, which can also mean divide, but more specifically entails splitting something in two -- like one might do with a sword. Luke's choice of diamerismos, "division," is the lone instance of this word in the New Testament. The verb diamerizo is more common, especially in Luke-Acts. Matthew, Mark, and John use the verb once a piece at the foot of the cross where the soldiers "divided" Jesus' clothes. Luke uses it twice in this passage but then also earlier twice in the crucial Girardian passage about Satan being divided from himself and thus causing a divided house that cannot stand (Luke 11:14-23). Luke's version reverses the riddle talking first about the divided house and then a divided Satan. Mark's version gives us 'Satan casting out Satan' and then a house divided. Mark and Matthew use the root verb merizo for "divide," rather than Luke's more emphatic diamerizo.

Resources

1. René Girard. This passage, and its parallel in Matt. 10, expresses one of the basic points in mimetic theory. Our human way of keeping peace is the scapegoat mechanism and, exposed as sacred violence in the cross of Christ, is gradually taken away from us as its effectiveness wanes. A basic part of Jesus' teachings, then, were "apocalyptic" warnings that violence would increase as our way of peace is taken away -- making his call for peace through God's way of peace -- love and forgiveness -- even more critical. He does come to bring peace but 'not as the world gives' (John 14:27). Our way of peace is sin which the Lamb of God comes to take away. So what happens in between the taking away of our peace and our embracing of God's peace? Sword and division -- father against son, son against father, etc.

One example of this might be the modern progress in dismantling sexism. The old way of peace meant sacrificing the desires and goals of the daughters and wives in families. As families have rightly become more equalitarian so has the discord, in many instances, increased between husbands and wives, parents and children. Divorce has increased greatly. Christ's showing us the way of love is needed in order to be able to desire with one desire as husbands and wives, without having to resort to the old sacrificial order of wives defering to husbands. Otherwise, mimetic rivalry ensues with an increase of division.

The bottom line is that Girard speaks of this passage in many of the cases in which he raises the theme of apocalyptic: Things Hidden, p. 181; I See Satan, p. 159:

Scapegoating phenomena cannot survive in many instances except by becoming more subtle, by resorting to more and more complex casuistry in order to elude the self-criticism that follows scapegoaters like their shadow. Otherwise, we could no longer resort to some wretched goat to rid ourselves of our resentments. We now have need of procedures less comically evident.

Jesus makes allusion to this, I think. It is the deprivation of victim mechanisms and its terrible consequences that he talks about when he presents the future of the evangelized world in terms of conflict between persons who are most closely related:

Don’t think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. One’s enemies will be those of his own household. (Matt. 10:34-36)

In a world deprived of sacrificial safeguards, mimetic rivalries are often physically less violent, but they insinuate themselves into the most intimate relationships. This is what the text I have just quoted specifies: the son at war with his father, the daughter against her mother, etc. The loss of sacrificial protection transforms the most intimate relationships into their exact opposites so that they become relationships of doubles, of enemy twins. This text enables us to identify the true origin of modern “psychology.”

David Cayley
In the New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. It is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword. For I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother... A person’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” The passage is puzzling. Why would Jesus’ gospel of love and mutual forbearance create division and discord? René Girard’s interpretation unlocks the puzzle. Human society, Girard says, creates order by channeling violence towards scapegoats. Envy and resentment are directed away from one another and towards a common enemy. Ritual sacrifices institutionalize this way of expelling violence. Jesus denounces the lie on which this system rests and allows himself to be crucified in order to reveal for all time the innocence of all sacrificial victims. But this revelation, by depriving people of the means to disown their violence and project it onto others, inevitably brings that violence home to roost, so to speak, setting father against son and so forth. Jesus flushes the hidden violence of culture into the open, imposing a choice on people, and it is this choice, Girard says, that constitutes the unveiling or uncovering that Christians call the Apocalypse.

René Girard
The Apocalypse is not some invention. If we are without sacrifices, either we’re going to love each other or we’re going to die. We have no more protection against our own violence. Therefore, we are confronted with a choice: either we’re going to follow the rules of the Kingdom of God or the situation is going to get infinitely worse.

David Cayley
This either-or, in Girard’s view, is the dynamic that the Christian gospel introduces into history. The effect is gradual, exerting itself over many centuries. But this doesn’t by any means imply that the world then grows magically less violent. Sacrifice is a means of limiting violence — a single victim thrown to the gods so that everyone can live in peace. So when people no longer sacrifice but also fail to repent, violence can easily grow worse and this worsening violence, Girard says, is an effect that many contemporary people seem to hold against Christianity.

René Girard
You know, I’m pretty accustomed now to these meetings about violence. Everybody’s talking about violence today. They’ve all read Voltaire’s Candide, and violence is a scandal to them. And so they ask, what kind of a God is that who is supposed to bring us peace and just look at the state the world is in? People show up indignantly, as if God were an American president who had not fulfilled his promises. But I say to them, where do you see it said in the Gospel that Christ came to bring peace? He tells you Himself that He’s bringing a sword and not peace, that He’s separating father from son, and so on ... Where do you find that the Christ promises immediate peace? Christ tells you you have to fight for the Kingdom of God. Otherwise you won’t have either the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Satan. Because the Kingdom of Satan, he says, is going to collapse as a result of its internal contradictions. It is going toward destruction. (The very beginning of tape 5, side A, in Ideas presentation of "The Scapegoat")

Objections have been made (Vögtle, Fiedler, Oberlinner, among others), as we have already briefly seen, to this way of putting the problem, stating that it is quite impossible to speak of a definitive rejection by Israel of the kingdom of God, and that therefore one has to distinguish clearly between a readiness for death, which certainly ought to be attributed to Jesus, and a certainty of death, which is not demonstrable. Consequently there are no historical grounds for the assumption that he understood his death as an atoning death and interpreted it that way to his disciples at the Last Supper. This view involves several historical judgments of detail which we have already considered and about which we came to rather different conclusions. But as the problematic of atonement is decisive for the way we understand the death of Jesus, we will have to turn to it again.

If God is imagined as an eternal, unaltering sun, which shines on humankind, unmoved, with constant goodness, then it might really be difficult to speak of a definitive rejection. With such a view, there goes a corresponding understanding of time, according to which there are no outstanding moments (or at most that of one's own death). Each hour is equally full of meaning or empty of meaning and therefore one can never say before the last moment of life that someone has definitively decided. At the most, there is a slow ripening toward goodness or a step by step falling away into evil. In line with this representation of time, one can even assume -- with a corresponding doctrine of the soul -- that the soul's processes continue after bodily death and never become definitive, as Origen may have assumed. In this case, the person and message of Jesus are seen entirely in terms of general ideas.

However, things are different if one thinks not merely of the general idea "Action of God," but of an actual action. Time appears in this case not as a continuous line, but it contains outstanding moments. With such an understanding, the kairos, the moment of fulfillment or opportunity, can be used or squandered. Now we have seen -- in agreement with most critical exegetes -- that Jesus announced the kingdom of God as an event, which could succeed or fail. It depended on his effectiveness -- in teaching, healing, and bringing together -- whether the spark actually passed from him to his hearers and whether the new assembly became an event. Jesus lived in a pressured time (expectation of the imminent kingdom), and this should have become a time of celebration [German Hoch-Zeit; Hochzeit is the common word for "wedding"]; in fact, even before the public rejection, it became for him -- because of people's lack of faith -- a heavy burden, which subjectively made the time stretch out again: "O you unbelieving generation! How long will I yet be with you? How long must I yet bear with you?" (Mark 9:19ff. and parallels). So we can understand how it could weigh on him that these dark events provoked by his proclamation might soon come about: "I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already burning. I must be baptized with a baptism, and how I am constrained until it is accomplished" (Luke 12:49ff.). These sayings are not easy to interpret. It is possible that fire meant in the first place the kingdom of God, which Jesus hoped would spread like a fire across the earth. But by baptism he certainly referred to something else. The disputed question, whether he was alluding to a coming baptism of judgment or whether he was more generally predicting an eschatological test, can remain open, as the sayings about baptism are enough to show that he was not proclaiming any general ideas, for which there was always a time. He found himself in a pressured train of events, and was pressed to bring things to an end himself.

Since the kingdom of God as the "time of grace" (Luke 19:44) was at the same time a time of decision, the answer was bound automatically to come out negative if the spark did not fly and the fire did not begin to burn. It was not a question of whether Israel consciously and expressly rejected Jesus by a numerical majority or whether one considers that later on many people would have given their approval. Since the event, which had its particular "time," did not materialize, and the "fire" did not begin to spread, a negative decision had de facto occurred. Before the outward resolution to kill Jesus there lay the inner decision, and he must have picked this up keenly, as his whole effort was being expended in summoning people away from the laws of their everyday behavior. Between the inner decision, which is essentially to be understood as a nondecision in the face of the summons given out, and which perhaps occurred very early on, and the outward reaction of his direct opponents, some time may well have elapsed, in which Jesus on the one hand continued his proclamation of the basileia -- even if under a heavy burden -- and on the other began immediately to make clear the consequences of rejection through the judgment sayings. It is important not to set up false oppositions here.

If the proclamation of Jesus was a salvation history event, then his hearers took on a role in salvation history. From the concept of role (so once more the significance of a dramatic view is shown), we can understand more precisely what is meant by definitive rejection. If one thinks of this as a final subjective refusal of God, then very serious difficulties result. On the one hand, in this case redemption would be won by means of the hell of those who rejected Jesus; on the other hand everyone would stand under the same threat even after Easter, as it is hard to see why the grace of redemption should be easier to accept than the grace of the basileia message. Everyone would stand in danger of the final destruction, without a convincing reason for hope. But from the viewpoint of a thorough going dramatic understanding of Jesus' fate, such an interpretation of the definitive rejection is excluded. Since Jesus' hearers acted in a salvation history role, rejection was part of their action as role players. They made their decision, in view of the new life and the new divine standard which Jesus proclaimed, by remaining caught in the laws and forces of this world. Definitive rejection means in this case: it has been definitively shown that the forces and powers by which human history is ruled stand in fundamental opposition to that message and that life brought by Jesus. In this context, the question of individual salvation remained at first open.

One further problem can be explained by means of the idea of dramatic role in salvation history. In the investigation up until now, the rejection of Jesus appeared in one way as something monstrous. How hard-hearted must Jesus' hearers have been if they did not open themselves to the message of pure forgiveness and unlimited goodness? In another way the rejection showed itself as something quite natural. Have not people always behaved the same way in history, and was not Jesus' demand concerning faith and love of one's enemy far too much for them, a utopian expectation? The idea of role allows these opposite aspects to be articulated together without contradiction. In the fate of Jesus a monstrous conflict between the kingdom of God and the laws of this world was in fact played out. But at the same time it became clear that the "players" are so ruled by strange forces that from their point of view no other decision could have been expected. Their actions were monstrous and totally banal at the same time.

The problems which are thrown up by the distinction mentioned above between readiness for death and certainty of death should consequently resolve themselves if the kingdom of God is understood as an event and seen in the context of the drama of salvation history. The question before which Jesus stood at the last meal with his disciples was not whether, after the rejection of the willing forgiveness of his Father, he should proclaim another opportunity for salvation, a "salvation on the basis of a substitute performance." The dramatic question was rather how the goodness of his Father can reach human hearts, after it has been definitively shown what opposition existed in the forces of this world and how far people were subject to them. The surprising answer of Jesus appears in allowing himself to be handed over to the dark powers (lies, violence, diabolical self-certainty) and to be struck by them. (Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 108-111)

4. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God. In ch. 9, "Symbol and Controversy," Wright details how Jesus' kingdom message clashed with the reigning symbols of his first-century Jewish culture: Sabbath, Food, Nation and Family, Land and Possessions, and especially the Temple. This passage clearly expresses the clash with the symbol of family; pages 398-403 outline Jesus' clash with Nation and Family. On the positive side, Wright also sketches out how Jesus redefined family, pages 430-432, characterized by one of the best-known features of Jesus' work: "his open table-fellowship with anyone who shared his agenda, who wanted to be allied with his kingdom movement."

Wright also fruitfully features this passage within two other sections: "Warnings of Imminent Judgment on 'This Generation,'" pages 329-333, and "Other Stories of the Return of YHWH," pages 640-642.

5. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, a section entitled "The Cost of Discipleship: Luke 12:49-13:9; 14:25-36," pages 36-39.

6. James Alison, Broken Hearts and News Creations, p. 39.

Reflections and Questions

1. In 2010 our congregation was fresh from a trip to San Lucas, Guatemala. We also as a parish have been trying to understand the way of the church in this age of great change, both in the church and our culture at large. Reflecting on these texts in the light of our current experience yielded the sermon "God's Way of Peace -- Through Suffering."

2. Are the two parts of this pericope related? Is Jesus coming to divide families related to learning to read the signs of the times? If one understands the sacrificial logic that underlies the institutions of our culture, which are most often centered on the institution of family, then I think we might relate these. The only true and ultimate peace is one for which God's entire human family might be united, without sacrificing anyone. Jesus' coming into the world challenges any lesser peace based on pitting some families against others. Jesus' peace causes the destabilization of those lesser families. When we understand this, we can learn to read the signs of our times.

Link to a sermon based on these themes entitled "The Peace that Passes Understanding." It begins with the story of a 'happy' family that isn't so perfectly happy, after all.