Thinking Upside Down
What divides a family these days?
"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have 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." - Matthew 10:34-36
For the Jewish people at the time of Jesus, the sword that cleaved the family was the commitment to God, to follow and live putting the love of God first.
What were the people doing wrong? Why did Jesus need to come? How could such a religious people beed to be redirected back to God?
Time and again, Jesus referred to the leadership of the community, the scribes and Pharisees and Priests who had led the people astray. focusing on using the laws to control and to bring in money.
Many might argue that times have not changed much since then. But they might also say that it takes money to do anything to help others. God's work takes funding and funding is money. So why split apart families?
I think we can oversimplify the problem and distill this down to two ways of living one's life.
Either we seek to make money so we can have enough to donate to help those in need, or we begin in the service of those in need and make do with whatever comes our way to satisfy our needs.
Most of us fit into the first category, I would assume. Until something goes wrong with our plan, we seek first to meet our needs and the needs of our families. If we were to seek God first, it could split the family apart.
The operative phrase there is "until something goes wrong" which represents anything and everything that messes up our plan, from floods to economic decline, to sickness and death, to losses of all kinds.
These things happen, and we are rarely ready for them.
Perhaps the way we can appreciate the world of Jesus is to think upside down. If we turn our world on its head, imagine the worst of all possible scenarios, we might begin to see what it would be like to be focused solely on making each day count.
Imagine life from the moment of our death backward to the present, one instant at a time.
Surely we would go through all the stages of denial, focusing first on ourselves, our loss and our pain. But after we have grieved for all we will not have and be, if we have any breath left, we might consider what we can do for others.
We would begin with those we leave behind, family and friends, people we love, and then we would radiate that love outward.
Faced with our own mortality, we would find the peace we sought in life, and we would understand what Jesus talked about.
When we think in finite terms like this, we realize we don't have much time to make a difference in the world. If we are to do that in any small degree possible, we need to start now.
It is that sense of urgency that Jesus shared with his followers. You have no idea what the future holds, so waste it not.
This, I believe, is the sword that splits families. Who wants to stop the train and get off when the destination is not reached?
Ah, but what if the train never reaches that destination?
What sense does the trip make then?
More to come...