I wish it were easy. Be good and be kind to people. That’s it, isn’t it?
No, it isn’t.
In our readings today we are warned it is a battle. Jeremiah suffers as a result of an arbitrary and weak-willed ruler who seems to favor the last person who spoke to him (Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10). Jeremiah wanted nothing more than to get out from the intrigue and contempt that was poisoning the life of the Israeli state of his time. God didn’t give him that option. He was called to prophesy and that’s what he had to do.
Jesus brings the battle closer to home, literally – into the home (Luke 12:49-53). Those closest to us will be at odds. This is not an unfortunate byproduct of Jesus’ teaching, it is part of how he will affect the world and anyone who sets out to follow him.
Shocking as this may seem it shouldn’t surprise us. What Jesus taught leads to death – to his death, and to our deaths. As Paul repeated so often, we die with him. Dying is not a pleasant experience, it comes hard, it likely involves pain, it certainly involves separation from those closest to us.
The Letter to the Hebrews points out we are not alone in this battle, this race, this struggle (Hebrews 12:1-4). Countless people have been through this before and are alongside us. They are witnesses to the fact that Jesus went through the fire that he spoke of – and death lost the battle. And so the peace that he brought was not a false peace, a peace where everyone plays nice and appears to be good until they feel themselves to be threatened and then they lash out and the battle starts again. His peace is the peace of another world, a world where we have given up our attachments to everything that holds us here, even to those people we think are closest to us.
If we keep our eyes on Jesus, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews exhorts us, we follow him through the cross, through whatever suffering we experience, to share his joy, as we too sit with our God in his kingdom.