“From now on a household of five will be divided.” (Luke 12.52)
It is something I wish I had not seen. In a world too often heartless, it seemed especially heartless. I once saw a woman refuse to enter the church for her mother’s funeral. Instead, she sat outside in a car during the service. It wasn’t that she disliked her mom. But she disliked her mom’s religion. Of course, it had been the woman’s own religion in her younger years, but she had traded her childhood faith in favor of a church that wanted nothing to do with her mom’s church. And apparently that also meant not attending her mom’s funeral.
I don’t know what the woman did during the service while she sat in the car. I was inside the church with the rest of the mourners. I hope she prayed for her mom. I hope she remembered special moments with her mom. I hope she didn’t stew over her mom’s religion. What I do know is that she stayed in the car when we entered the church and she still was in the car when we exited the church. To tell the truth, I should have expected it. I’d seen her do the same thing at her dad’s funeral just a few years’ earlier.
Wrongly, I thought she wouldn’t let her religious beliefs stop her from attending her mom’s funeral. Come on–this was her mom–the same woman who had fed her as a child, wiped her tears and her rear when she was a baby, had helped her find her way into adulthood. There was a lifetime of moments shared and a long list of a mother’s sacrifices. But none of that stuff mattered in the end. She would not attend her mom’s funeral service. Like I said, she made her statement from the seat of a car parked outside the church. I think she kept the windows rolled up, as if the air outside also was tainted. We need no clearer proof that religion divides.
When we hear the Jewish Rabbi say that those who follow his way will experience family divisions, maybe he was thinking about that woman in her car. More likely, he knew the heart of humankind well enough to know that divisiveness is part of our DNA. After all, families-at-each-other’s-throats is as old as the first page of the Bible when Adam’s and Eve’s two boys had a divide so wide that it ended up with one of them murdered by the other one. We could say, in some ways, even then it was religion that divided those brothers. Cain felt God favored Abel more than he did him.
We hesitate to tell the Rabbi what we think here, but if there’s one thing we don’t need more of, it’s divisiveness. Our world already is divided so many ways it looks like one of those jigsaw puzzles that can’t be put back together again even by the most dexterous. It’s not just brother against brother anymore. It’s citizens against citizens. Nations against nations. Anywhere we look, it’s division. So, we want to say, Rabbi, please don’t bring any more divisions into the picture. We have enough.
The irony here, of course, is that the reason Yeshua bar Jossef tells his followers that he brings division with him is because his teaching is the opposite of what the world teaches. He wants to bring people together, not separate them. He wants everybody to be a family, not strangers. He wants one and all to feel like an insider, not as an outsider. In fact, we will hear him specifically say that his idea of family is one no longer based on bonds of blood, but it is a bond built on the commonality of all peoples. He wants a world where we’re brothers and sisters, all of us children of the same loving God, who is our Father-Mother.
And in that iconoclastic message we find the cause for the divisiveness that he says will come–the belief that there aren’t appreciable differences between people. The Teacher’s message of inclusion runs contrary to the idea of exclusion that too many of us believe is the only way to live in the world. We excel at exclusiveness. Always have, and barring a more honest practice of the Teacher’s way, we always will. The ways that we use to exclude others is endless. Color. Country. Creed. That unholy trinity we find everywhere. Then there are other methods for excluding “them” from us. Gender. Language. Sexual Orientation. Education. Work. Money. Zip codes. Clothes. The many ways we find to divide up the universal family is hampered only by our imagination, not by our conscience.
In walks the Rabbi from Galilee and he tells us there is another way. He speaks of community, of commonality, of outsiders sharing a table with insiders. If his teachings on inclusiveness weren’t divisive enough, he shows us by his life how it can and should be done. He sees little difference in nationalities and easily crosses borders. He disregards age-old enmities and presents enemies as the heroes of his stories. He even refuses to divides saints from sinners, and so he walks, talks, sleeps, and eats with the very people our moms told us was bad company to keep. That is the kind of behavior that, as he predicted, sets the earth on fire because it rocks us back on our heels and blows our minds. We end up being disconcerted, distressed, and discombobulated when the distance between us and “them” is so effortlessly removed by the Rabbi.
In the end, the learned Rabbi learned how strong the counter punch of the world would be. His message of tolerance was intolerable, both to the religious leaders and to the politicians. The man who included everyone unimportant was excluded from everyone important. He was labeled an outsider, one of “them,” was nailed on a cross outside the city, and was laughed at by the crowds who saw him, not as a fellow human, but as someone who wanted to destroy their way of life.
They stabbed his side with a blade to make sure he was gone for good. and they walked away from the execution with a smile on their faces, and with a confidence that their world would stay just as divided as it always had been, and just as divided as they always wanted it to be. So desperate were the people with the power to bury his message beneath the ground, right along with his bones, that they put him in an unmarked grave–the ultimate mode of dehumanizing by taking away his name. They wanted to make sure that his message of inclusion, his desire for us to turn a blind eye to big time differences, and his open feasting with seats for power-players put beside seats for prostitutes was forgotten. They ripped up that seating chart and they washed their hands of the mess and they thanked God everything was back to the way it should be.
But what they failed to understand was the power of the powerless to take the message of the Crucified One and to make it a way of life in a world hellbent on living the opposite message of exclusion. His small band of brothers and sisters continued to gather around a table to celebrate unity with one bread and one cup, to state unequivocally that there was neither Greek nor Jew, and to see everyone in the world as part of one human family. And, against all odds, that outrageous message by the outsider Rabbi has continued to live, especially in the outposts of the world where believers still hope for a better world, a better way, a better life for all.
As he forewarned us, those who believe in this way of inclusion too often find themselves excluded, and those who welcome the outcast become outcasts themselves, and those who sit down with enemies soon enough are labeled enemies. So, the Rabbi was right when he said his message would bring division, but only because too many people do not want a world without prejudice, a world without injustice, a world without walls.
But try as the insiders might, and crucify the messengers as they will, they cannot stop the fire of hope that burns in the chests of those who hear the words of the Galilean Rabbi when he said, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” Consider this recent example of just such a fire blazing. One of the victims of the El Paso shooting was a 63-year-old woman whose husband invited the public to her funeral because he had no other family. Almost a thousand people showed up for the funeral. People flew in from as far away as Los Angeles and from New York City. They all gathered inside the La Paz Faith Memorial Center in El Paso, although they were strangers. As the press reported, one person in the group who stood quietly in line and waited for his chance to say goodbye to someone he never knew, put it this way, “I know her now. We’re all family, bro.”
Of course, that belief, as the Teacher said, is something the majority of people will find divisive.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 