August 18, Ordinary 20C (Luke 12:49-56; Jeremiah 23:23-29)

How do we reconcile Jesus, the bearer of God’s peace, with his passionate words about division—“son against father, mother against daughter”—in this week’s Gospel reading?

In an essay in Feasting on the Word, biblical scholar Audrey West suggests we utilize “a symbolic interpretation in which the parent-child conflict represents the division within the self between the mind and the passions, as rational thought seeks to overpower the impulses of sin.” While I don’t believe that our rational minds should always be trusted to guide our faithfulness, I do think it is fruitful to examine the internal division that Jesus’ call to discipleship inflicts on us all.

In the urban, cosmopolitan, and increasingly diverse areas I have lived, it is not at all a revolutionary thing to preach the gospel as a message about justice. Many mainline Christians take it as a given that Jesus’ notion of peace involves lifting people out of real-world oppression and poverty, that his peace is opposed to dehumanizing ideologies of misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Yet even as we preach messages about Jesus’ peace, others might wonder at our personal and institutional practices, noticing the cracks of division between our words and our actions. “The hardest thing in the world,” writes Goethe, “is to act in accordance with your thinking.”