“I came to bring fire to the earth…” “Is not my word like fire and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?…” “Not peace, I tell you, but rather division!” On each side, we are certain, certain, that the hammer of righteousness belongs to us alone.
These Gospel words about family conflict could be read as a teaching about priorities —a call, as Saint Benedict would say, to “prefer nothing to Christ.” But wait. Doesn’t Benedict also tell us to treat everyone as Christ? Isn’t love of neighbor—meaning love of everyone—one of Jesus’s core teachings? Can this same Jesus really have wanted to turn family members against each other?
On closer reading, Jesus is not necessarily saying that he wants us to quarrel. Adapting a passage from the prophet Micah (7:6), he predicts that his teachings, like any challenge to the existing order, will result in dissension (“five in one household will be divided…”). What if his next remark, about reading the signs of the times, is a way of saying: You who pride yourselves on predicting the heat and storms of meteorological nature, why are you caught off guard by the quarrelsome tendencies of human nature? Far from urging us to raise our fists at each other, he may simply have been acknowledging that his teachings tended to incite heated debate over what it really means to be faithful to God.
Through all our readings today runs a thread about faithfulness and conflicts of loyalty. Jeremiah is concerned about prophets who testify in bad faith, who betray God by falsifying God’s word. And today’s passage from Hebrews also centers on faith and faithfulness. On the surface, it celebrates the great deeds of generations of heroes who remained trustingly faithful to God at all costs. But hidden in the gallery of heroes is another story of conflicting loyalties.
Did you catch the line about Rahab? The book of Joshua tells how, after the death of Moses, Joshua sends men across the Jordan to reconnoiter the kingdom of Jericho, in whose outer wall Rahab lives. Rahab is certain that Joshua’s people are invincible; she and her people have heard of their great escape across the sea and subsequent conquests. So she hides Joshua’s spies from the pursuing king of Jericho in return for being spared, along with her family, by Joshua’s conquering army. The letter to the Hebrews celebrates her for being faithful to the right side. But surely the people of Jericho could wonder why she was so faithless to them.
“Is not my word like fire and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” On each side, we are certain that the fire and the hammer of righteousness belong to us alone. It’s human nature.
But it’s not all of human nature. When I began reflecting on Luke’s description of a divided household of five, I couldn’t get his words “three against two and two against three” out of my head. In music, that phrase names a rhythmic device that I struggled to learn on the piano. Imagine half of this room chanting “joyful, joyful, we adore thee” (1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2) while the other half sings “merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.” The two rhythms seem irreconcilable. It’s a real mind game learning to play one with your right hand while you play the other with your left. Yet in context, with the right notes, the effect can range from dramatic to tender, from a climactic clash of opposites to a reconciliation or even transcendent union.
That, too, is human nature. Humans composed that music, humans play that music, humans are moved by that music. T. S. Eliot, contemplating the cosmic union of reciprocal opposites such as hunter and hunted, wrote: “Above, the boarhound and the boar / pursue their pattern as before / but reconciled among the stars.”
We may not always know how to be faithful to both the path we hear God calling us to and the loved ones and neighbors (remember, everyone is a neighbor) who follow a conflicting path with equal commitment and faithfulness. Yet Christ is in them as in us. God can count three and two at the same time, even when we cannot. We are at least reconciled among the stars.