Luke 12: 51
What Jesus, in today’s passage, tells us about is the divisions that occur between parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives when Jesus walks into our lives. In short, a whole house full of slamming doors and a dinner table is empty—all because of Jesus.
How do we reflect ourselves on this disturbing statement? Perhaps, we all wish Jesus could divide us from our enemies from those who hit and hurt and lie and steal, from those who corrupt and destroy the creation—but not from our families.
Actually, this disturbing line is not the only one, just the one of many in the gospel, that is especially about family value. In the gospel of Luke, chapter 8, Jesus’s mother and his brothers came to see him in one of the towns where Jesus was teaching, but they could not reach him because of all the people.
Of course, Jesus’s mom and his brothers thought that Jesus would be pleased, so the crowd told Jesus they were there and that they wanted to see him. Do you know how Jesus responded to this request? “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”
I believe Jesus did not despise the family and denounce its value. What Jesus meant to do was to redefine family.
For Jesus, family was not a matter of blood relationship. It was not a matter of who has the same last name or lives at the same address. Rather, family is a matter of whose image we are created in and shared with. Family is the one who serves the same God. With this sense, Jesus and his family became huge beyond counting, with many sinners and even Roman centurions in it.
To Jesus, a family tree was not important. As much as his ancestors may have mattered to him,
it was more like a family forest he walked around in, with relatives collected from all over the place, but all of them gathered in one place.
Whenever we say “FCC family,” I believe that it is not just a saying. Our deeds, actions, and even small gestures, not words, shall tell us what it really means.
Loyalty to God is not one allegiance to be juggled along with all the rest. It is primary.
It should be our first priority. And it is not negotiable. This is a real inconvenient truth for our faith journey.
Let’s keep growing into Jesus - even though we keep doing it so unevenly.
Let’s keep facing a real inconvenient truth even though the way of world keeps inviting us into
a more convenient way.
Amen.