Just six years before his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson finished a project he had begun nearly twenty years before. Jefferson had been compiling his own version of the Bible by literally cutting and pasting verses from the Gospels and reassembling them to create a harmonized version of Jesus’ life. I imagine Jefferson hunched over his desk at Monticello, laboring fastidiously with the light of reason pouring in through the transparent neo-Classical windows. Working from Greek, Latin, French, and English versions of the Gospels, one of Jefferson’s goals was to create a chronological account of Jesus’ life, as he titled it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
If the title sounds a bit reductionist to you, then you would not be off the mark. Jefferson was so steeped in Enlightenment thought that it governed every aspect of his cut-and-paste endeavor. But in his Scriptural compilation, Jefferson was not just creating a harmonized account of Jesus’ life from four quite different Gospel accounts. Jefferson was also excising those parts of the Gospels that did not seem reasonable or natural to him, particularly those parts that emphasized Jesus’ divinity. There is no walking on water or miraculous healing in the Jefferson Bible. The story of Jesus ends with his being laid in the tomb. There is nothing beyond it. The product of Jefferson’s adventures with a razor presents a picture of Jesus that is more like a very good and wise person than the Son of God.
It seems that Jefferson regarded Jesus only as a teacher of moral precepts. There’s no mystery to him. There’s no undue harshness to his teaching that might prick our complacency. There’s no evidence that in the person of Jesus God’s kingdom breaks uncomfortably into this world in order to bring about a revolution in human life. As Jefferson himself noted about his finished product, “[t]here will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently [Jesus’], and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”[1] This sounds, well, very civilized, very elegant, very tame, and very understated.
In the Jefferson Bible, Jesus may say harsh things at times, but with all the supernatural cut out, Jesus is never strange. He is never so wonderfully odd as to embody a heavenly kingdom that upends the world’s values in any kind of dramatic way. Jefferson refrains from featuring Scripture verses that seem discordant or, on the surface, at odds with other sayings of Jesus. His intention to harmonize the Gospels has the effect of blunting the sharp edges of Jesus’ challenging teaching and making Jesus rather like a gentlemanly moral philosopher.
It should be no surprise, then, that Jefferson conveniently omits Jesus’ saying that he has come not to bring peace but the sword. Jefferson literally took the sharp edge of a razor to the pointed words that we hear Jesus utter in his Missionary Discourse. This is where the rubber hits the road for his disciples, where the life of discipleship gets tough. So one might briefly sympathize with Jefferson in overlooking an uncomfortable line. Jesus’ words here are not easy to digest. They’re not easily comprehended, and they seem patently at odds with what he says just a few chapters before in the Sermon on the Mount. And Jesus’ words also seem to be indirectly and uneasily addressed to us, too, and not just to his immediate disciples.
So, it begs the question, how did we move from a Jesus extolling peace to a Jesus who says that he did not come to bring peace but a sword? Is this Jesus who brings a sword the same Jesus who, after his arrest, told one of his companions to sheathe his sword after he cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave? Is this the same Jesus who bids peace to his disciples in his post-resurrection appearances to them?
It also seems a cruel trick of the lectionary that on this Father’s Day, we hear Jesus say that he has come to “set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Believe me when I tell you that I had to tackle this one for a children’s homily, and it was not easy.
If we’re honest with ourselves, I imagine we don’t like Jesus’ language here. It’s not civilized enough, and well, it seems a little violent. Just as I wrestled with whether to shield the precious ears of children from Jesus’ harsh words, I suspect that many of us have a strong tendency to domesticate Jesus from time to time. “Jesus, did you actually intend to say that? Could you please clarify what you really mean?” Or we chalk up Jesus’ harsh words to editing by an angry Matthew or a terse Mark. Like Jefferson, we might be tempted to take some sharp scissors to the provocative verses that we hear today. Why not just conveniently gloss over them, or pretend like Jesus didn’t mean what he said?
But, thankfully, we’re not dealing with the Jefferson Bible. We have been handed a wondrously strange text by tradition, and so what if we were to see the challenging parts as a spiritual gift to us? Origen, an early Christian scholar, suggested that when we are stuck in trying to make sense of a troubling passage of Scripture, God calls us to go deeper into the text. The challenge in the text is a sign that there is something we have yet to understand and that the Holy Spirit will eventually reveal to us. If we take a cue from Origen, what is it that we can learn from today’s Gospel text? What is Jesus really saying?
For starters, we might feel the uncomfortable prick of the sword imagery that Jesus offers us. Whereas Thomas Jefferson took a sharp razor and removed the parts of the Bible that did not suit his moderate and refined ways, we might paste those jagged parts back together and let the sword of Jesus’ dissonant and confusing words needle our conscience and challenge our complacency.
We have plenty in Jesus’ words to comfort and reassure us, but nobody ever said that the good news wouldn’t hurt a bit, too. That same word of God that Jesus uttered and embodied is also “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.”[2] At times, Jesus’ word is going to cause some pain. If we don’t feel the pain from time to time, it’s probably not the Gospel.
But we can also readily assume that Jesus doesn’t enjoin us to commit physical violence against one another or to foment divisions. Jesus is telling us something else. His sharp word pierces our politeness and our elegant living with a sword of truth that cuts right through our usual etiquette.
If we can assume that Jesus himself is not initiating violence or wielding a physical sword, then we might conclude that Jesus’ very presence wreaks havoc on all neatly constructed systems and relations that reject God’s truth. Like it or not, in Jesus, God’s kingdom has pierced the veil between this world and the next. And to our eyes, what seems to be disorder and division is really the unintended effect of God re-ordering this resistant world as it should be.
Anyone who has followed God’s call has probably known the pain that occurs when the Gospel unsheathes its sword of truth. Perhaps it’s a severed relationship when a corrective word is spoken to a friend in the face of injustice. Jesus’ word takes a sword to the exclusive bonds of clans and cliques in which we protect ourselves, especially when they suppress the voices of the marginalized. You see, anyone who loses their life for the sake of the Gospel will know that a sword comes with it.
And this sword doesn’t stop there. This sword cuts at our safe definition of peace, sharpens its meaning, and hands us a new one that tells us something about God’s peace, not our so-called peace. As the past few weeks have shown us, the church has for too long adopted a safe version of peace, which is really no peace at all. The demure Jesus of this peace is eerily similar to the genteel, elegant, and reasoned voice of Jefferson’s Jesus, doling out wisdom on how to live a balanced, ethical life but not making too many waves and certainly not walking on any.
Talking about peace, at least as we imperfectly understand it, can too easily lapse into a justification of the status quo and a defense of complacency. And so is it any wonder that we feel some degree of sympathy for Jefferson’s sharp razor when it tames Jesus down a bit? But such a neat, rational view of Jesus is devoid of God’s word of truth breaking into our world, as cutting as it may be. And there is no glorious but strange new kingdom that slices through the present atmosphere of spiritual malaise and confronts oppression.
The painful truth is that we can be at peace with those around us but in conflict with God. And that’s why we need a sword. We need Jesus’ sharp sword to disturb our cut-and-paste version of peace, which is no real peace. God’s peace looks very different, because it’s a peace that passes all understanding.
God’s peace demands a wholeness and completeness that suffers no person to be outside the circle. And until this peace is realized, it’s going to hurt. God’s word as Jesus has revealed it to us cuts through the hurtful and angry words we hurl at one another and reveals them for what they are. God’s word cuts and trims the complacency off our hearts until we have new ones. In God’s pruning process, the human family is reordered. Family tree lines are expanded in some places, new branches are added, and when God is finished with this genealogy project, we will see the restoration of one human family, not biological but grounded in the knowledge and love of God.
As the Book of Common Prayer urges us, let us not “make peace with oppression.”[3] Let us not settle for a compromised peace. Let us not shy away from the sharpness of the sword that cuts out our sin and slices through injustice.
And let us not stop striving for God’s peace, and nothing less, until our devotion to God is greater than family, clan, or friendships. For then we will see that family does matter to God, because when God finishes with us, our family will have become so much larger. And we will see that, in the end, God has pasted us all back together again, and no scraps are left out.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
21 June 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
[2] Hebrews 4:12
[3] The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 260