Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn
“a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law –
a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” (Matthew 10.34-36)

You’ll recall this as one of Jesus’ many rants about biological family. It sounds strange to our “family values” ears. So what is Jesus trying to say about the Kingdom of God in this passage? Notice the locations of conflict:

Son/Father
Daughter/Mother
Daughter-in-Law/Mother-in-Law

Crossan unpacks these pairs:

[N]otice where and how emphatically the axis of separation is located. It is precisely between the generations. But why should faith split along that axis? Why might faith not separate, say, the women from the men or even operate in ways more random? The attack has nothing to do with faith put with power. The attack is on the Mediterranean family’s axis of power, which sets father and mother over son, daughter, and daughter-in-law. That helps us to understand all of those examples. The family is society in miniature, the place where we first and most deeply learn how to love and be loved, hate and be hated, help and be helped, abuse and be abused. It is not just a center of domestic serenity; since it involves power, it involves the abuse of power, and it is at that precise point that Jesus attacks it. His ideal group is, contrary to Mediterranean and indeed most human familial reality, an open one equally accessible to all under God. It is the Kingdom of God, and it negates that terrible abuse of power that is power’s dark specter and lethal shadow.

Excerpt of a blog post by Richard Beck. Go read it.

Painting by Carin Fausett

Tags:Carin FausettdivisionJesusJohn Domanic CrossanMatthew 10 34-36powerRichard Beck