Divided Houses (Lk 12:49-56)
10th Sunday after Pentecost
This will be a shorter post, as this week Elaine and I are amidst the spectacular (but long) drive from Saskatchewan to Oak View, after a rich (if intensive) three weeks with family and friends. We are mostly without internet, so I’ve scratched this out while Elaine is at the wheel.
This Sunday’s Lukan lection is a bit of a head scratcher, at least from a narrative point of view. But it is part of the final section of an extended teaching cycle—the longest uninterrupted discursive series in the Third Gospel.
This sequence is notably is bracketed by important stories of women as shown at right. The second female-focused object lesson is the RCL gospel for 11. Pentecost next week.
This week’s reading consists of three loosely related parabolic warnings, each one also resonating with earlier Lukan themes:
“I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!”
This first exclamation invokes the wilderness prophet John’s vision of a “baptism with fire” (3:15), while also alluding forward to Jesus’ own fate at the hands of Roman executioners. Would that this searing teaching would rescue us from domesticated theologies and practices of the sacrament of baptism!
“Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided, father against son and son
against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
This acknowledges for a second time the inevitable disruption that Jesus’ call to discipleship wreaks upon personal and political business as usual (the Greek verb diamerizō is used in both 12:53 and 11:18). In the previous chapter, this warning was addressed to a “palace” divided, a thinly-veiled allusion to the imperial regime in Luke’s version of Mark’s “strong man” parable (Lk 11:17-22; see HARP pp. 115-117). Here the domestic household is the locus of division, family being the most intimate site of socialization into the dominant culture of conformity. The repeated pairings of conflict means to underline the fraught nature of tensions between discipleship and domestic orthodoxies.
He also said to the multitudes, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, `A shower is coming’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky; but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
In last week’s gospel, Jesus exhorted his followers to learn from flowers and birds about the “Great Economy” of Creation. Ironically, here he commends his people’s ability to “read” the weather (a skill ancient humans had that we do not). However, he laments that this traditional competence is not matched by a capacity to discern the meaning of the historical moment (kairos). He names this as a kind of “hypocrisy” (a Greek term for play-acting), which is to say that we tend to live according to fictional narratives that prevent us from seeing what is really going on in the struggle between empire and God’s Great Economy. This is acute in our time of Trumpian fairy tales and dark mendacity.
Each and all of these teachings invite us to awaken to the work of discipleship in our own kairos. And they prepare us to read more deeply the lections for the 11th and 12th Sundays in Pentecost, which return our focus to healing the disparity between poor and rich, a disease that ultimately kills both.
Note: As summer begins to wane, and a return to school and/or work rhythms looms, it’s a good time to make an invitation to readers of this blog for your partnership. If you are not yet receiving our BCM emails, please sign up here. More importantly, we need your help in getting word about HARP into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” Because the publishing industry has been structurally adjusted such that corporate priorities take precedence over marketing books, it is now up to authors and their readership to promote books that matter. None of us are professional vendors, but together we can spread the word and build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy.
—Ched
