Reflection on Matthew 10:34-36

 

 Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. – Matthew 10:34-36

 

 Like many, I find this more than uncomfortable. It seems to stand in direct tension with other sayings of Jesus: "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matt. 5:9), "Love your enemies" (Matt. 5:44), "Put your sword back into its place" (Matt. 26:52), and the image of Christ as the Prince of Peace. 

   How have theologians "tamed" this? How have I managed to bracket it out? For I tell you my first thought is the way sects divide families and turn children against parents and siblings. And the thought of loving a God / God-man who requires me to make an enemy of my beloved parents, well, I don’t think by definition God, who is love, could do that. But I want to reflect on the passage from this starting point. 

     The dominant interpretation from the early Church Fathers onward is that Jesus is not commanding violence. The "sword" is a metaphor for the division that inevitably results when some accept the Gospel and others reject it. (Though one asks why a disciple was armed with a sword in Gethsemane.) The image comes partly from the prophet Micah (7:6), which Matthew is explicitly echoing, as I have learned. So the point is descriptive rather than prescriptive – Jesus’s purpose in coming is not to make everyone get along. He knows his message will divide households because ultimate loyalties are being challenged. Aquinas writes that Christ is the source of true peace, but that peace with God can produce conflict with those who oppose that higher good.

     Another common interpretation is that Jesus is radicalizing loyalty to God. Immediately after the passage, Matthew has Jesus say: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." For Augustine, Aquinas, and much later thinkers like Joseph Ratzinger, the issue is ordo amoris, i.e., the ordering of loves. Parents, children, nation, tribe, and culture are genuine goods. But none is ultimate; love for a child or a parent can lead to one losing one’s soul – imagine if a human being did unspeakable evil to your child. If you are like me, you would probably go insane with bloodlust and see the evil-doer as a monster to be destroyed without pity. Is my faith strong enough to prevent that? I think not. It is an extreme example, but I am trying to think of how my love for my family could come into tension with my soul, as conceived by Christ.

    The point is, the painful possibility exists that obedience to conscience or God may require breaking with one's family. The Christian martyr who refuses emperor worship, the convert rejected by relatives, the dissident who opposes an unjust regime. . .these are examples of the "sword." The division is tragic, but the alternative would be subordinating truth to social harmony.

     For Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, Christ does bring peace, just not the cheap peace of avoiding conflict. Truth itself creates a crisis. The Cross is the supreme example: reconciliation with God comes through an event that provokes opposition, rejection, and suffering. The peace Christ brings comes after truth and conversion, not in the mere absence of conflict. 

     Modern historical-critical scholars like Ehrman and Martin emphasize the apocalyptic context. Jesus expected God's kingdom to arrive in a decisive way. Such moments of divine judgment were often imagined as producing sharp divisions even within families. These historians credit Matthew 10:34-36 with a high probability of being authentically from Jesus precisely because it seems to undermine the overall theological message of Jesus as a founder of peace. (“The peace of the Lord be with you always” – thus concludes every Catholic mass. “Peace be with all” is the Orthodox variant, I have read.) And it is evidence for their reading of the “historical Jesus” as an apocalyptic prophet. What is that?

   As I have learned from Ehrman and Martin, in the context of first-century Judaism, an apocalyptic prophet was not just someone predicting the end of the physical universe. Rather, he proclaimed that God was about to intervene decisively in history and establish his rule. Concretely, an apocalyptic preacher would typically believe: 1) the world is deeply corrupted; 2) human efforts cannot ultimately fix it; 3) God will soon intervene; 4) the wicked will be judged; 5) the righteous will be vindicated; 6) a new age will replace the present age.

     The key word is soon. Jesus believed that this divine intervention was imminent, according to these historians. That allows us to make sense of many otherwise shocking sayings. "Leave your nets." Why? Because the Kingdom is arriving. "Do not worry about tomorrow." Why? Because God is about to transform the world. "Let the dead bury their dead." Why? Because ordinary social obligations are less important than responding to the approaching Kingdom. "I have not come to bring peace but a sword." Why? Because the final crisis is dividing humanity into those who accept and those who reject God's reign. Seen this way, Jesus begins to resemble figures like John the Baptist much more than the gentle moral teacher often presented in modern churches. John says: "The axe is already laid to the root of the trees." That is classic apocalyptic language. Judgment is not someday. It is about to happen.  So on this reading, Jesus is saying that the crisis of God's kingdom is so urgent that even the most sacred earthly relationships may be disrupted. Well, I do not think one can deny this account plausibility. It just takes away the Christ Christians love. Indeed, I find this reading more disturbing for faith than Darwin or anything science could possibly discover.

     The interesting thing is that the great theologians often transform this expectation of imminent apocalypse. For example, Augustine, Aquinas, and Ratzinger read these sayings less as predictions of an imminent historical event and more as revelations of enduring spiritual truths. The Kingdom becomes partly present in the Church. Judgment becomes an ongoing reality. The end becomes both future and already present. This is one reason historical scholars and theologians sometimes seem to be discussing different Jesuses. The historian wonders what Jesus probably meant in Galilee around 30 CE. The theologian wonders what this saying means in light of the Resurrection, the Church, and two thousand years of Christian reflection. Related questions, but not the same. 

. . . 

   Rereading Matthew, this text remains unsettling for me in spite of all the reasonable attempts to take away its sting. The text does not merely say that conflict may occur. It says: "I have not come to bring peace but a sword." The wording is stark. I can understand that some readers would feel that the later explanations soften language that Matthew intentionally leaves hard and shocking. If you reads Matthew straight through, you will notice a recurring pattern: Jesus' demands often seem absolute, uncompromising, and willing to subordinate ordinary human attachments to the coming Kingdom. This is not unique to this passage. One finds similar tensions in "let the dead bury their own dead" and in the demands of discipleship generally. That is why even great theologians rarely claim the passage is easy. Rather, they argue that the "sword" is not physical violence but the painful division that arises when ultimate commitments confront one another.

    The deeper question, the one that troubles me, is whether this is a profound truth about conscience and ultimate loyalty, or whether Matthew's intensely apocalyptic vision pushes the demand beyond what many people can wholeheartedly affirm. That question is not really resolved by the traditional interpretations; they explain the text, but they do not entirely remove its sting. If Jesus was speaking from an intense expectation that God was about to act very soon, then sayings like "hate father and mother," "let the dead bury the dead," and "I came not to bring peace but a sword" become historically intelligible. They are the language of emergency. But if you read them as timeless instructions for ordinary life over the next two thousand years, they become much harder to accept without substantial reinterpretation.

     That tension lies behind a great deal of modern scholarship on Jesus and also behind many of the theological efforts to soften, spiritualize, or universalize these difficult sayings. The historian often explains them by their urgency; the theologian often explains them by their deeper meaning. The two approaches are not necessarily incompatible, but there is a tension. 

    Finally, this fits in with the reinterpretation of Jewish theological concepts from the last entry. So apocalyptic comes to mean something more spiritual, eventually the Roman Empire becoming Christian. So from a historical perspective, scholars say that Jesus proclaimed an imminent apocalyptical Kingdom – God is about to intervene in history, judge evil, raise the dead, and establish his reign. But the expect end does not arrive. Thus Christianity reinterprets the apocalyptic language. The Kingdom becomes partly a future expectation but partly present in the Church and partly present in the heart transformed by Christ’s love. Judgment becomes again partly a future event but also a present moral reality. Resurrection becomes partly the future bodily resurrection, but also present spiritual rebirth. The Messiah becomes not merely Israel's king, but the cosmic Logos. The Temple becomes Christ, the Church, the community of the faithful. Israel becomes the Church, or at least the Church as the fulfillment of Israel. Apocalyptic itself becomes increasingly spiritualized. Augustine rejects the expectation of a literal thousand-year earthly kingdom and interprets the "millennium" of Revelation symbolically. The Kingdom is already present in the Church, though imperfectly. In that sense, the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great and his successors could be understood by many Christians as a kind of historical manifestation of Christ's victory. Not the final Kingdom, but evidence that Christ was already reigning. 

   From the perspective of a historian like Ehrman, this would is a profound reinterpretation of Jesus' original message. From the perspective of a theologian like Augustine or Joseph Ratzinger, it is not a reinterpretation but a deeper understanding of what Jesus meant all along. That is why the debate never ends. 

    Finally, I would refer back to the pattern I clumsily tried to trace in Matthew in the last entry. The Jewish concepts remain, but their meaning shifts. I seem to have just added apocalypse to the list. Thus the question I raised in that entry – new wine in old bottles or a new bottle for new wine? – appears again here. The fulfillment or the overturning of the Torah? For Matthew, the fulfilling but the book shows just how on the razor’s edge it is. The old Jewish vocabulary was retained, but its meaning was gradually transformed, a historian might claim. The old vocabulary finally disclosed its deepest meaning, the theologians. It is easy to see how other Jews of the time would have seen this as completely heretical. 

    When is a concept stretched to the limit and when does it break and become a different concept altogether? I cannot resist a little philosophy here. Think about the example of marriage. Over time, many features traditionally associated with marriage have changed, but not all changes have generated the same level of controversy. The decline of arranged marriages, changes in property rights, or the reduced social expectation of having children were widely understood as modifications within the institution, within the concept. The recognition of same-sex marriage, however, raised a more fundamental question. For some, marriage is essentially a public, lifelong commitment of love and mutual support, and extending it to same-sex couples represents a development of the concept. For others, sexual complementarity is one of the defining features of marriage, and removing it creates a radically (at the root) different concept while retaining the old name. The disagreement is therefore not primarily about social policy but about conceptual identity. A concept can stretch remarkably far while preserving continuity with its past, but at some point reasonable people may disagree about whether they are witnessing the development of an existing concept or the emergence of a new one under an inherited label.

 This, I think, is an analogy to the tension between the old and the new in Matthew. 

. . . 

   Perhaps my problem is just that Matthew was writing for a Jewish-Christian audience in a Jewish world and thus uses the vocabulary he does. It is not just that I am post-Enlightenment but Greek largely, i.e. Plato or Aristotle would also have struggled with this world version as much as any post-Enlightenment person. Matthew's world, even if heretical from a Jewish point of view, is profoundly Jewish in a way that neither Plato nor Aristotle would have found intelligible. The central questions are not things like What is the nature of Being? What is the highest good? What is virtue? What is the structure of reality? Rather, Matthew’s questions are more Who is the true Israel? How is God's covenant fulfilled? Who is the Messiah? How is the Law rightly interpreted? When and how will God establish his Kingdom? Different kinds of questions. I can imagine a Greek philosopher encountering Matthew wondering why the ultimate meaning of existence should depend on the destiny of Israel, a Messiah descended from David, the fulfillment of prophecy, disputes with Pharisees, or the fate of the Temple. That is not how Plato approaches reality in the Republic, nor how Aristotle approaches it in the Metaphysics or Nicomachean Ethics. Plato begins from the question of the Good and Aristotle from the question of Being and flourishing. Matthew begins from the conviction that God is acting decisively in the history of Israel. What a difference!

   What is fascinating is that Christianity itself gradually became a meeting place between those two worlds, even in Matthew. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas basically translated the biblical world into Greek metaphysical language. The Kingdom becomes participation in the Good. The Logos becomes the rational principle of reality. Salvation becomes the fulfillment of human nature, of our final end or telos. The Beatific Vision becomes the ultimate end of rational creatures. One could even say that much of classical Christian theology is an immense act of translation between Jerusalem and Athens. 

    When I reflect on Matthew's polemics against Pharisees, his concern with fulfillment of prophecy, his genealogy from Abraham, his emphasis on the Kingdom of Heaven, and his apocalyptic urgency, I feel I am entering a very different conceptual universe. The irony is that many of the theologians that I consider my teachers from Augustine to Aquinas, to Ratzinger, von Balthasar, and Ware, were themselves engaged in bridging exactly that gap. They loved Matthew, but they often read him through lenses already shaped by Plato, Aristotle, and later metaphysical reflection.

      So I suppose what I am trying to do is the same translation that much of Christian theology has performed for two thousand years: asking how these historically Jewish symbols and narratives disclose truths about reality, goodness, and human flourishing more generally. I guess the difference is that these great theologians (representative for many others) assumed that the translation preserves the original meaning, whereas I am haunted by modern historical-critical scholarship in that I wonder whether something important was lost or transformed beyond recognition in the process, changing the original in fundamental ways. That is at the heart of the tension I have been trying to explore.