Sunday Sermon 21st June 2020
MATTHEW 10 21 June Christ’s Church, Mandurah
Today’s Gospel passage should be prefaced by a question: Do you want the good news first or the bad news first. Because this passage contains both. Let’s take the bad news first:
If I were looking for a rousing Bible passage to advertise Christianity and recruit disciples, I don’t think I would select this passage. Because it doesn’t sound like much fun does it.
Jesus seems to be warning that whatever happened to him might happen to his followers. He was called the “prince of demons” by the Pharisees. The same would happen to his followers. The authorities would hate and would kill Jesus. That might happen to the followers.
If the followers wanted peace, well, it wasn’t going to happen.
If you were a first century Christian and you decided to follow Jesus, you were not in for an easy time. You could have been thrown out of the synagogue; you could have become an outcast from society, and you had men like Saul of Tarsus hunting you down. You could have been disowned by your family, which would have been the ultimate disgrace.
For the original Jewish community of Jesus and even for us today, this passage sounds outrageous.
How can Jesus Christ, the son of God and the fulfilment of the Holy Scriptures, encourage people to be in conflict with their families. It simply doesn’t fit in with what we know of Jesus.
And this isn’t the only time Jesus speaks like this: in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus talks about hating your family.
Unfortunately like many of the original words of Jesus, the real meaning of what he actually said has been lost in translation. Most of what we read in our Bibles has been translated from Hebrew, from Aramaic, from Greek and from Latin, so it’s no great surprise that there have been some misinterpretations.
The Hebrew word which Jesus actually used was “SANEH”, which doesn’t mean hate or conflict at all; Biblical Hebrew lacks the language to define in a comparative sense, so in the Hebrew language, the opposite of “to hate” is “to prefer.”
Jesus was telling his followers, not that they should hate their families or deliberately be in conflict with them, but they should prefer to follow him and his ministry above all other things.
To put this passage in context, we need to think about the society in which Jesus lived. The first loyalty of the Jews was the kinship system: loyalty to family, home and friends.
The family gave you your identity, and helped determine your place in society, especially if you were a woman. Your obligations to your family included providing support for family members when they could not provide for themselves; welcoming a new bride to the family and accompanying the dead on their last journey.
These were obligations you simply could not avoid as a good Jew, and yet Jesus seems to be questioning the value of these traditions. And as Jesus was a Jew, he was also under obligation to uphold the rites and customs of his society.
Then there was the honour/shame system: you gain status through how others see you. In fact, your place in society was determined by your economic status, your family connections and by how others saw you.
This passage is a fantastic piece of writing because it shakes all of society’s accepted values in one go. That’s why it is so shocking: because it tells everyone that everything they have known and understood should be turned upside down.
Family, society and money are not what life is all about. It’s not that these things are not important, but they are of secondary importance, a long way behind our love for God.
The quotation Jesus gives about setting families against each other because of him comes from the book of the prophet Micah, written about 700 years before Jesus was born.
Micah prophesied to the nation of Israel that God’s judgment was coming and that they should repent before it was too late. Micah warned that terrible divisions would occur whenever God would do something new in the covenant.
And Micah also prophesied that an eternal King would be born in Bethlehem, through whom God planned to restore his people.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem and new things are happening. The old ways are being shaken up – not overthrown, but fulfilled through Jesus. And people were being shunned by their families and their sanity questioned because of their faith in Jesus. On once occasion, even Jesus own family thought he was mad.
Nothing has changed since Jesus spoke those words. We still have to make our own choice about whether we believe in God and in his son Jesus Christ. No one can make these decisions for us.
It may be that some people will not be happy with our choices. My mum was appalled that I gave up a career as a bank manager to become a priest. And yet my cousins in England think it’s a great joke to call me “the Rev”, or “the vicar of Dibley”.
So if all of that is the bad news, what is the good news?
It is simply this :
'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
AMEN
Today’s Gospel passage should be prefaced by a question: Do you want the good news first or the bad news first. Because this passage contains both. Let’s take the bad news first:
If I were looking for a rousing Bible passage to advertise Christianity and recruit disciples, I don’t think I would select this passage. Because it doesn’t sound like much fun does it.
Jesus seems to be warning that whatever happened to him might happen to his followers. He was called the “prince of demons” by the Pharisees. The same would happen to his followers. The authorities would hate and would kill Jesus. That might happen to the followers.
If the followers wanted peace, well, it wasn’t going to happen.
If you were a first century Christian and you decided to follow Jesus, you were not in for an easy time. You could have been thrown out of the synagogue; you could have become an outcast from society, and you had men like Saul of Tarsus hunting you down. You could have been disowned by your family, which would have been the ultimate disgrace.
For the original Jewish community of Jesus and even for us today, this passage sounds outrageous.
How can Jesus Christ, the son of God and the fulfilment of the Holy Scriptures, encourage people to be in conflict with their families. It simply doesn’t fit in with what we know of Jesus.
And this isn’t the only time Jesus speaks like this: in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus talks about hating your family.
Unfortunately like many of the original words of Jesus, the real meaning of what he actually said has been lost in translation. Most of what we read in our Bibles has been translated from Hebrew, from Aramaic, from Greek and from Latin, so it’s no great surprise that there have been some misinterpretations.
The Hebrew word which Jesus actually used was “SANEH”, which doesn’t mean hate or conflict at all; Biblical Hebrew lacks the language to define in a comparative sense, so in the Hebrew language, the opposite of “to hate” is “to prefer.”
Jesus was telling his followers, not that they should hate their families or deliberately be in conflict with them, but they should prefer to follow him and his ministry above all other things.
To put this passage in context, we need to think about the society in which Jesus lived. The first loyalty of the Jews was the kinship system: loyalty to family, home and friends.
The family gave you your identity, and helped determine your place in society, especially if you were a woman. Your obligations to your family included providing support for family members when they could not provide for themselves; welcoming a new bride to the family and accompanying the dead on their last journey.
These were obligations you simply could not avoid as a good Jew, and yet Jesus seems to be questioning the value of these traditions. And as Jesus was a Jew, he was also under obligation to uphold the rites and customs of his society.
Then there was the honour/shame system: you gain status through how others see you. In fact, your place in society was determined by your economic status, your family connections and by how others saw you.
This passage is a fantastic piece of writing because it shakes all of society’s accepted values in one go. That’s why it is so shocking: because it tells everyone that everything they have known and understood should be turned upside down.
Family, society and money are not what life is all about. It’s not that these things are not important, but they are of secondary importance, a long way behind our love for God.
The quotation Jesus gives about setting families against each other because of him comes from the book of the prophet Micah, written about 700 years before Jesus was born.
Micah prophesied to the nation of Israel that God’s judgment was coming and that they should repent before it was too late. Micah warned that terrible divisions would occur whenever God would do something new in the covenant.
And Micah also prophesied that an eternal King would be born in Bethlehem, through whom God planned to restore his people.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem and new things are happening. The old ways are being shaken up – not overthrown, but fulfilled through Jesus. And people were being shunned by their families and their sanity questioned because of their faith in Jesus. On once occasion, even Jesus own family thought he was mad.
Nothing has changed since Jesus spoke those words. We still have to make our own choice about whether we believe in God and in his son Jesus Christ. No one can make these decisions for us.
It may be that some people will not be happy with our choices. My mum was appalled that I gave up a career as a bank manager to become a priest. And yet my cousins in England think it’s a great joke to call me “the Rev”, or “the vicar of Dibley”.
So if all of that is the bad news, what is the good news?
It is simply this :
'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
AMEN
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