The passage we are going to read today from Luke 12:49-56 is, according to New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “high on the list of Things We Would Rather Jesus Hadn’t Said. It’s not gentle, it’s not meek and mild; it’s not even nice. Parents and children at loggerheads, in-laws getting across one another—what can Jesus have had in mind?”
Well, the only way to find out is to read the passage and explore it a bit. Listen for God’s word to you from Luke 12:49-56…
“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.”
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?
Jesus came to bring fire to the earth.
Fire usually refers to judgment when used in the Gospels. So, by this first statement Jesus is telling us that he came to bring judgment.
William Barclay has written, “However much we may wish to eliminate the element of judgment from the message of Jesus it remains stubbornly and unalterably there.”
The question is: to what judgment is Jesus referring?
Perhaps that question is answered in Jesus’ next statement…
Jesus says, “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!”
Jesus seems to be referring here to his death on the cross. This is not the only time when he referred to his death as a baptism. In Mark 10:38 he asked the sons of Zebedee, “Can you drink the cup that I am to drink or be baptized with the baptism that I shall undergo?”
This can sound very ominous and frightening. But right in the middle of this statement, there is good news. It is the good news that Jesus experienced the fire of judgment for us on the cross, a baptism that figuratively poured fire on him instead of water, Jesus did this so that we don’t have to go through the fire.
I have used the illustration before of the prairie fire. In days of old, during a fire on the prairie, farmers would often burn a circle around themselves, their family, and their most precious possessions, so that when the prairie fire reached the scorched earth, it would stop, and the family would be preserved.
Just so, when we stand on the scorched earth where the cross stands, we too are safe from the fire of judgment.
In this passage Jesus reveals to us something amazing about our God. Our God is a holy God who cannot tolerate sin. Sin must be punished, or else God’s holiness is violated.
But our God is also a loving God, so he has chosen to take that punishment upon himself, through Christ’s death on the cross. God takes the punishment due to us for our sin, and in exchange he gives to us the righteousness of Jesus.
The third thing Jesus says in this passage is put in the form of a question: Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?
Most people today would probably expect Jesus’ answer to be “yes”. After all, Jesus is the Prince of Peace, is he not?
Surprisingly, Jesus says, “No, I haven’t come to bring peace, but rather division!”
What does Jesus mean by this?
Jesus explains himself in his very next words: “From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.” Then Jesus gives us a biblical allusion to Micah 7:6. It is a verse about family dysfunction that is part of Micah’s lament about his contemporaries.
Micah was a prophet in the latter part of the eighth century BC in the southern kingdom of Judah.
Bible commentator, N. T. Wright, has this to say about Micah and his connection to Jesus hundreds of years later…
Like the suffering heroes of Hebrews 11, the prophet [Micah] continues to trust in God (7.7) and his coming rescue. He looked by faith, Hebrews would say, to God’s future, now finally revealed in Jesus himself, the example of our faith and the object of our hope. But to those who refuse this faith and hope, this same Jesus declares that he has come, prophet-like, to divide Israel down the middle. If the vineyard is yielding wild grapes, what else is the owner to do?[1]
The kind of division that Jesus brought is all too clear when one examines the history of the early church. Most of Jesus’ first followers were Jews as Jesus himself was a Jew. But not all of his people chose to follow him. In fact, we see in Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts, how some Jews chose to persecute their fellow Jews who chose to follow Jesus. Saul of Tarsus was one of these persecutors, until he met Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus. Then Saul became Paul and a follower of Jesus proclaiming the Good News throughout the Roman Empire. And what did Paul receive in return for all of his labors? He received persecution from his fellow Jews.
And does not Jesus continue to cause division to this day? When one person in a family of atheists or agnostics becomes a follower of Jesus, the result is not always pleasant.
In one of his letters, C. S. Lewis describes the situation this way…
Someone becomes a Christian, or, in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them! The boy must be mad! And the conceit of him! Or is there something in it after all? Let’s hope it is only a phase! If only he’d listen to his natural advisers! Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know.[2]
Lewis experienced the same thing in his own life at the time of his conversion. From 1918 to 1951, Lewis cared for the mother of a friend who died in the First World War. In fact, Mrs. Janie King Moore, C. S. Lewis, and his brother, Warren Lewis, lived together. When the Lewis brothers returned to Christian faith in 1931 and started attending their parish church, Mrs. Moore would often chide them for participating in Holy Communion, or what she called “blood feasts”.[3]
The final question Jesus posits in our passage for today is this: why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
Jesus talks about how his contemporaries were able to read the signs in earth and sky but not able to read the signs of the times.
We lived for ten years in the mountains of Virginia, with no television and limited radio and even limited internet connection at first. When my mother moved in with us in 2012 at the age of 84, everyday her first question to me was, “What’s the weather?” I had to explain to her over and over again that I had not seen or heard a weather forecast and that the best way to tell what the weather was going to be was to look out our living room window where we had an expansive view of the mountain range across the valley from us. Living in an isolated, rural area like that, we had learned how to read the signs of earth and sky.
Probably everyone who lived around Jesus in the first century knew how to do that. I imagine they even had proverbial sayings as we do. Sayings like: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”
But what did Jesus mean when he suggested that his listeners did not know how to read the signs of the times?
The signs of the times that Jesus’ first listeners, for the most part, were not reading aright were the signs of the Messiah, the signs of his impending death, and the signs of the coming confrontation with Rome.
But you might ask, what relevance does this have for us two thousand years later?
N. T. Wright answers that question this way:
The church has from early on read this chapter as a warning that each generation must read the signs of the times, the great movements of people, governments, nations and policies, and must react accordingly. If the kingdom of God is to come on earth as it is in heaven, part of the prophetic role of the church is to understand the events of earth and to seek to address them with the message of heaven.
Wright tells the story of the great composer Beethoven who would sometimes play a trick on his audiences.
He would perform a piece on the piano, one of his own slow movements perhaps, which would be so gentle and beautiful that everyone would be lulled into thinking the world was a soft, cosy place, where they could think beautiful thoughts and relax into semi-slumber. Then, just as the final notes were dying away, Beethoven would bring his whole forearm down with a crash across the keyboard, and laugh at the shock he gave to the assembled company.
Wright then makes this application:
… there may come a time when Christian teachers and preachers find, like Beethoven with his salon audiences, that people have become too cosy and comfortable. Sometimes, for instance, the selections of bible readings for church services omit all the passages that speak of judgment, of warnings, of the stern demands of God’s holiness. Maybe there are times when, like Jesus himself on this occasion, we need to wake people up with a crash. There are, after all, plenty of warnings in the Bible about the dangers of going to sleep on the job.[4]
What is the application of this passage for us? I think it is simply this: that we too must be ready to face judgment, just as Jesus warned his first century audience. And the best way to be ready for future judgment is to follow Jesus now.
[1]N. T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays, London: SPCK, 2000, p. 96.
[2]C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III, New York: HarperCollins, 2007, p. 831.
[3]Hooper & Green, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Glasgow: Collins, 1980, p. 197.
[4]Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone, London: SPCK, 2004, pp. 158-161
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