Why does Christian faith carry a tension between love and judgment?
Why does the Bible speak with such beautiful tenderness one minute, and such strident warning the next?
What do we do with the fact that the most loving person to ever live, Jesus Christ himself, is also the one who spoke more about hell that anyone else we meet in Scripture?
Last week we read of Jesus’ compassion for the crowds. How they were like sheep without a shepherd. He healed the sick and empowered his followers to do the same. What an amazing, beautiful picture. He told his disciples to give freely of God’s grace, as they themselves had received freely God’s unmerited love and acceptance through him.
The demonically oppressed were about to be delivered.
The hurting were about to be healed.
The downtrodden were about to be lifted up.
But in this week’s passage, Jesus warns his disciples of suffering and death. “Don’t expect to be treated any better by the world than I am,” he says in verse 24-25. “If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul,” the Lord of the Flies, the devil, Satan, “how much more the members of his household!”
Just a few paragraphs earlier, in a portion the lectionary skipped over, the Pharisees had accused Jesus of performing miracles by demonic power (chapter 9, verse 34). If Jesus could be called evil in the midst of delivering the demonically oppressed from their sufferings, how much worse will the world view his followers, Jesus warns: People who, unlike Jesus, really do sin— egregiously, and sometimes quite often. People who, unlike Jesus, won’t always succeed in their efforts to heal; who won’t always discern situations with God’s perfect wisdom; who won’t always serve with the best motivations, with unmixed devotion, or with unwavering faith.
“So don’t be afraid of the world,” Jesus says (verse 26). “All they can do is kill your body. The only one you need to fear is the one who can cast your body and soul into hell…”
And here, again, is one of those confusing slaps in the face. What is Jesus saying? “Did he just threaten us?,” the disciples must be wondering. And no doubt, as church history has shown, many a minister of the gospel really should have taken more seriously the possibility that God might send them to hell. But what Jesus is saying to his disciples (and to us) is that the only one we really need to be afraid of is God. Not the world. Not our families. Not even our supposed enemies.
They, and we, need not fear the world. We need fear only God.
But who is this God we must fear, who stands above every other fear? Jesus tells us: The one who cares for the sparrow (verse 29). The one who knows the very hairs of our heads (verse 30). The one who says to us, time and again in the Scriptures, “Don’t be afraid” (verse 31). And this tells us a bit about what’s going on with Jesus, with heaven and hell, and the whole paradoxical relationship between love and judgment we find all over our Bibles: In Jesus, God has come to the world as its very salvation, and those who should have been the most ready for this salvation—the deeply religious, the temple leaders, and the teachers of the Bible—looked at Jesus and called him a devil. In Jesus, God has offered the world a glass of cold water. But the world has knocked the glass away and drunk poison instead.
A world that can do something like that, especially to itself, is a dangerous place.
“Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven,” Jesus goes on. “But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.” Clearly there is a warning here not to give in to the world’s threats. Remember who we’re supposed to fear? The God who loves us. But who are we tempted to fear? A world that hates us, or loves us with a poisonous love. But Jesus himself is the salvation the world wants and needs. “So choose me, even over life itself,” Jesus tells his disciples.
But then comes the real zinger of our text this morning: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (verse 34).
After these words, you can almost hear a record scratch and the room fall silent. What is Jesus saying, exactly? He’s saying his arrival as this world’s salvation is also the moment of this world’s judgment. To be offered life and say No—for that matter, to be offered life and simply refuse to say Yes—is to choose death instead of life. It’s to say to sin and death, “I’m all yours.”
God is love, but sin is deceptive. And the world is a dangerous place.
We get a further sense of what Jesus means with his words of warning and judgment from the Scripture he quotes in verses 35-36. It’s from Micah chapter 7, verse 6. In that chapter, the prophet laments on behalf of his people. The nation has become a fruitless vine. There is no one upright in the land, Micah says. The people murder and give bribes. The rulers are unjust. No one can trust their neighbor. It’s the day of God’s visitation, and the people are mired in the confusion of sin. Sons dishonor fathers. Daughters rebel against mothers. “A man’s enemies are the members of his own household.” This is the passage Jesus quotes from and applies to himself in verse 35. Jesus’ arrival is the arrival of God. But at the threshold of the day of God and salvation, Jesus warns his disciples, many people will still be fooled by their sin.
Therefore, Jesus goes on, “anyone who loves their earthly relations more than me is not worthy of me” (verse 37). “Whoever does not take up their cross,” an instrument of one’s own execution, “is not worthy of me” (verse 38). “Whoever finds,” or tries to save,” their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (verse 39).
The paradox of this passage is the paradox of Christianity itself.
God is love, and he desires the salvation of all people. He has pursued us by his Spirit, and spoken to us in his creation and by his Word. He has come among us in the person of Jesus, and sent his people into the world to point the world back to himself. But the world chooses itself instead of God. It chooses sin instead of divine, eternal love. It looks at the flaws of God’s people and dismisses the God of such an imperfect, foolish people. And even God’s own people sometimes begin loving this world more than God—putting the good things of God, like family and health, in the place of God himself. They fear the world’s disapproval more than God’s, and they fall into conflict with one another.
But in the midst of it all stands the Savior. His offer of love and redemption is a judgment against all our sin. Jesus comes pointing us and the world back to God, but we and the world whip him and nail him to a cross. So the God who knows the hairs of our heads has to warn us. He has to remind us that idolatry kills—even, and perhaps especially, the idolatry of good things. This is the offensive and difficult nature of God’s loving call.
We follow a God who wants nothing but our best, so he warns us of the worst and makes seemingly impossible demands. He gives us good things in life, but warns us not to love them with the wrong kind of love. He says if the world tries to kill us, we should let it—not because God wants us to die, but because self-preservation can so often make us willing participants in the evil of this world. He calls us to live like Jesus in the world, even if it means the world kills us.
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves,” Jesus tells his disciples back in verse 16, “Therefore be as shrewd and discerning as the snakes of this world…but as harmless and innocent as the doves.”
Let’s Pray
Mikael Ivaska 