How quickly our consumer-distraction-assembling habits have come to a screeching halt! Almost overnight going-just-to-be-going has become a danger, and gathering has been eliminated for the common good and community survival. Instead of eating out, we are resurrecting that old recipe book mother gave us or checking on-line to see how to actually make a perfect pot roast or mac and cheese, providing we can find the ingredients to make them.
We have been asked to “shelter in place.” That has all kinds of implications, one of which is being thankful for shelter at all, a blessing many do not have. It also means spending more time with spouses and family. With distractions whittled down to movies, games (on and off line), social media (the constant and welcome ding of the text-waiting notification), we may hopefully turn to actual conversations, great books, and creative output. Maybe it is a really good time to write a song! Or paint a picture! Or do a craft with the kids!
It also means coming face to face with ourselves, coming to grips with our darker side that creates conflicts or discovering the “angels of our better natures.” Both could be a good thing. In this self-quarantine we might read with new eyes the scriptures, and in this present context discover some deeper meanings of some of the passages that have been a puzzle in the past. One such passage for me has been Matthew 10:34-39.
When Jesus said, (Matthew 10:34-39) “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth but a sword”, it seems so inconsistent with His message of peace. But what if, like most of His words, they were to be taken on many levels: personal, historical, spiritual, and prophetic. What if, for example, He meant on a personal and spiritual level that we must “kill off” everything in ourselves but our real, naked selves, the selves God made us to be—to strip off everything that keeps us from being authentic and constantly takes precedence over Him—like the dying process does, or as Thornton Wilder put it, like a “weaning away” so that we’re eventually happy to die to everything that isn’t eternal.
Maybe spiritually there is a weaning-away of preoccupations with personal beauty, success, accomplishments, other relationships (even right ones and definitely wrong ones), security—everything except just our naked helpless eternal self, standing before God. “I come to help you slay it all,” He says. He brings the sword to us. And the slaying must be done every time anything or anybody rises to pre-eminence and muddies up our motives.
We are not called to war against others, but to free ourselves from selfish attachments to them so that we can be freed from them to then love them purely with the love of Christ as our stripped down, vulnerable, no-angle self. This self is the “sanctified” or blood-anointed self, the one washed clean of all self-serving motivations and needs, stripped of attachments and addictions to things, relationships, status, needs for affirmation, so that, naked before God once again, we can love as He loves by just being a not-needy presence of Light. People in darkness, stumbling around, trying to find their way will be drawn to the Light and not be electrocuted by our selfish needs and thus confused or repelled by those who say they follow Jesus.
If we let God give us a sword to kill anything that is a facade, a veneer, a phony semblance of what He created us to be, including false and selfish uses of relationships, then maybe He could lead us “in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake,” innocent as Eden and ready to be citizens of a new heaven and a new earth.
