(Luke 12:49-56)

49-53"I've come to start a fire on this earth—how I wish it were blazing right now! I've come to change everything, turn everything rightside up—how I long for it to be finished! Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I've come to disrupt and confront! From now on, when you find five in a house, it will be—
   Three against two,
      and two against three;
   Father against son,
      and son against father;
   Mother against daughter,
      and daughter against mother;
   Mother-in-law against bride,
      and bride against mother-in-law."
54-56Then he turned to the crowd: "When you see clouds coming in from the west, you say, 'Storm's coming'—and you're right. And when the wind comes out of the south, you say, 'This'll be a hot one'—and you're right. Frauds! You know how to tell a change in the weather, so don't tell me you can't tell a change in the season, the God-season we're in right now.

The Gospel according to Luke was probably the last Synoptic Gospel to be written towards the end of the first century AD. In the spring of A.D. 70 Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army. The Roman soldiers built a siege wall that totally surrounded the city. The wall was four and a half miles around, with thirteen large forts outside, and the huge Roman army completed it in just three days. The building of the siege wall, forts, and platform for their rams, necessitated the clearing of woodlands over sixty square miles, leaving it as a desert. The eventual destruction of the Temple was so complete, that the land on which the temple had stood was ploughed up (taken fromwikipedia.org).

Luke has to make sense of this to a fledging church facing persecution and conflict. The picture that he sketches out in this passage sounds dreadful. What has happened to the "Peace on earth" promised by the Angels at Jesus’ nativity? Jesus is pointing out nothing more contradictory than the fact that some conflict must arise before there can be genuine peace. It would have been a comfort to the early church to think that Jesus had anticipated something of what was happening to them. Luke wants to make the point that what was happening to them was no more than what happened to Jesus. As he journeys toward Jerusalem, Jesus became a source of conflict and opposition to the Jewish authorities; it all ended in a violent confrontation with death. His words are marked with a sense of apocalyptic urgency and anguished intensity.

Jesus is talking about the nature of truth. There are two parts to this: the first is that we can miss the truth if it is right in front of us and the second is that if we do recognise the truth for what it is then we might not like what we see. We can miss what is being said because we are pre-determined in what we are looking for; the answers we get depends on how we see the world we live in, with its systems of meaning and cohesion. We prize a God with an infinite capacity for empathy, a God who is "nice." (Bumper stickers tell you "Jesus loves you"). In this passage Jesus is being blunt, rhetorical, passionate and challenging – not letting himself be tied down to any cultural perception of ‘gentle Jesus good and mild’.

Alternatively we can understand exactly what Jesus is saying but not like what we hear. Luke is deliberately challenging his readers over what they might expect of Jesus. "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?" Jesus says. It appears as a deliberate contradiction of the "Peace on earth" anthem sung by the angels over Bethlehem. Jesus seems to be defying his own reputation. He leaves our definitions of his role empty in the grasp of our tight expectations, like Joseph’s clothes in the clutches of Potiphar’s wife (Gen 39:13). He does not allow himself to be boxed in by what we want and expect of him. Yes, he has come to fulfil the law (Mt 5:17), but he will still heal on the Sabbath (Mt 12:10). Yes, his soul will be sorrowful "even unto death," (Mt 27:36) but he will rise from death.

The vision embedded in Jesus’ stark words is not one of conflict for conflict’s sake, but one of fragmentation for the sake of wholeness. If our world were nothing but a place of happiness and beauty, peace and love then Jesus’ challenge would be deeply troubling. If, on the other hand, our world is already conflict-driven, deeply marred and scarred, with systems of meaning that are oppressive, exploitative and unsustainable, then what he says is more understandable. We need a redeemer who can address this situation we are in.

Luke offers a caution and a promise. The promise is that we need to be ashamed or frightened of conflict, even when it is a result of disagreement within the family. The caution is that people fight hard when their particular vision for the future is changed. This God intervening in our world and people end up scrapping, bickering and fighting with each other. When we intervene in someone else’s world we might expect no other – Iraq is an example of the result of badly managed intervention. How wonderful life would be if every story had a happy ending and all loose ends were tied neatly into a bow at the end of the day. But life is not like that. Christian redemption is that edge where change is possible. It is a crisis that is an opportunity as well as a judgement. Life cannot (re-) emerge without confrontation; we should not be surprised that innovation and reinvigoration necessitates creative destruction, upheaval and perpetual revolution.

Ideas drawn from: www.religion-online