06.21.2026 - Pentecost 4  - Kris Perkola

In this passage, Jesus gives the disciples several loosely connected teachings about the challenges of discipleship. I find this all a rather difficult passage! Jesus gives several warnings about how his followers will face persecution and family estrangement for their faith with very little in the way of comforting words. Nevertheless, these sayings would have spoken to Matthew’s community as a kind of reassurance that the persecution that they had already experienced in their lives was not unexpected nor a result of their own failings. 

Matthew’s gospel was probably written a decade or so after the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in the year 70. After that apocalyptic event, division between Christians and Jews increased until finally Christians were explicitly excluded from Jewish synagogues, making the break into two separate religions complete. As a community of Jewish Christians, this would have been extremely painful for Matthew’s community. Many of them would have directly experienced the family division that Jesus describes here. They would have wondered, could they have evangelized better? Could they have done more to bring a greater number of their fellow Jews to faith in Jesus? Here, Jesus assures them that this was always going to happen, and it was not their fault that they have experienced setback and division. 

There is some comfort in this passage. Jesus lets us know how much God cares for us by saying that God cares for all God’s creatures, represented by the humble sparrow, but that God cares especially for us humans. The final line of the passage is also a comforting promise. We may lose much in following Jesus, but we gain a life of meaning and purpose which is all part of our eternal lives that will extend even beyond death. There is a point to what we do here even when our very families seem to be against it. 

For us today, many of us don’t know exactly what it was like for Matthew’s community in early Christianity, but we do experience friction with family and our community when we express what we believe Jesus is all about. Not all professed Christians support a message of “all means all”, but we shouldn’t assume that is because we haven’t “sold” the message well enough. Expressing Jesus’ radical love for all is always going to create friction. But our lives are richer for the work we do. And hopefully the world will eventually bend toward Jesus’ love and justice through the Spirit working through us!