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Text: Matthew 10:24-39
This reading from the Gospel of Matthew seems like a mishmash of sayings about one thing or another. By my count, there are fourteen different ideas, vaguely related at best, in these sixteen short verses. What do sparrows have to do with secrets have to do with teachers have to do with families in conflict? And even if we can find some common thread—which I think we can do and will—even then, it is hard to see the good news, that is, the gospel, in them.
This passage is in the middle of the tenth chapter in Matthew, a chapter which some have called the mission discourse. In it Jesus speaks to his disciples, his students, about the life that they can expect if they choose to follow him. It is, on the face of it, not a life of happy expectations. It is full of betrayal (“brother will betray brother to death,” he says at the beginning of it), persecution, and divisiveness.
Throughout, as in the portion we just heard, Jesus repeatedly urges them to not be afraid, advice given no doubt because what he is saying is fearsome. They might be asking themselves—or if not, we might be asking on their behalf—why would I follow this man? Yet they stay with him, because they have become convinced that Jesus has the best way they have come across of answering one of central religious questions: who am I?
We are people who value the individual. Individualism underpins our notions of democratic government, of commerce, of medical care. Sacrificing oneself for another, we say, is heroic, or foolish, but in any case considered to be extraordinary. This was not very true in Jesus’ time.
And in our time it is more pervading myth than the way people actually operate. We are more social than individual. We willingly make constant accommodations so that we can live in groups—cities, cultures, nations, faiths. We are watchful of others, easily attentive to social rules and boundaries. Sacrificing one’s self-interest for others in the group is the norm, the ordinary.
It makes us nervous when our group—what we sometimes call “our way of life”—is threatened. We can respond with violence, or with despair, or when things seem otherwise hopeless, as in apocalyptic literature—which this passage in Matthew resembles—with hope for a radical re-start. We seek not individual survival so much as survival of our group. Of us, however that is defined.
The appeal of Jesus to those who first followed him was not that each of them would live forever, or even survive, but rather that the civilization—their civilization—would. The promise of the Messiah was not especially a promise to individuals but rather to Israel, a nation, a people; a promise that Israel would not perish but would live and prosper. And, in a just and godly society, individuals would as a consequence (and not a cause) find contentment, and joy, and peace, which are its fruits.
Who are we, then? If we are known by those with whom we are aligned, who are those people? And where does God fit in this? Who is God for us? That is, whom do we acknowledge as God in our dealings with the world and with one another? And who are we for God? If God is our lord, what is our commitment to God? How are we—as a group—obedient to God? And what do we expect from God? When Jesus speaks, right at the center of this passage in Matthew, about acknowledging Jesus, the word he uses is the root of the word homologous, meaning “the same as.” Those who acknowledge Jesus make a claim, in a way, of being the same as Jesus. In the same group as Jesus.
One way to think about who we are is to think about the people whom we care for without question. “Home,” says a character in a Robert Frost poem, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” To which her husband replies, “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
We think first of our families—home—then friends, neighbors. And perhaps expanding into race, nation, culture. Expanding boundaries, encompassing larger and larger groups, but with boundaries nonetheless. Those distinctions are in the end unhelpful. They are the foundation of racism, sexism, exploitation, slavery, wars—all those institutions whose lives depend on accentuating the differences between those within and those without. People who are deserving and those who are not. But these distinctions, while seeming to promise safety and happiness, have not led to the world we hope for, have not made the world a place of contentment, joy, and peace.
Jesus preaches that the survival of the world will not come about by more aggressive enforcement of boundaries between people (as we often think) but by ignoring those boundaries, as he often does. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, Jesus says. The word he uses here implies not value but seriousness. It comes from a word meaning “heavy.” Whoever identifies him or herself first of all as a member of a family, rather than as a follower of Jesus, is not taking Jesus seriously. He is saying that if you owe first allegiance to your family (or nation, or faith), you just don’t get it. The group with which you most identify is too small for the mission that Jesus has in mind.
Those who find their life will lose it, Jesus tells the disciples. He speaks here not about their biological life, but their psyches, their souls, their selves. Their identities. Who they are. Those who find their selves, their identities in traditional groups like families and cultures, will be as one who have no selves, or at least diminished ones. Jesus is inviting us to take his identity as ours. Not to be Christian, a word and concept which does not exist in the Gospels, but to be aligned—homologous—with Christ.
We are the people whom God loves more than sparrows, and God loves sparrows very much. We are the people whom God knows in more detail that we know ourselves. We are the disciples who are like the teacher.
It is scary when boundaries are crossed and long-standing walls between people are breached, when secrets are exposed and whispers shouted, when old loyalties must be betrayed, when no affiliation has claims as strong as God’s. Jesus warns his disciples. But at the same time he reminds them of who they are: children of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, at home in God.
