Call Me Devil

Lections: The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 12), AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last week Jesus instructed His disciples on how to be Him: how to seek out the lost sheep, whom every system had failed; how to cure ailments both physical and spiritual; how to proclaim liberation to the captives and hope to the oppressed. He taught them—and thereby teaches us—to let our peace rest on every household we encounter. And should that peace return unrequited, we are simply to shake the dust off of our feet.

I said then that this is not naïveté, not polyannish optimism. “I send you out,” our Savior said, “as sheep amidst the wolves.” Today His Missionary Discourse continues by laying out the price that we must pay, the consequences for daring to walk the Way of Jesus Christ. “A disciple is not above the teacher,” He warns us. “If you go out in My Name, to do My works, to proclaim My Kingdom, then the world will treat you as it has treated Me.”

That’s the flipside, isn’t it? If we want to be like Jesus, if we want for others to see the Christ in us, then we cannot expect any better than what our Savior suffered. Indeed, that may be the metric of our success. Christ wasn’t crucified because He was a pushover. Rome and Jerusalem together crucified Christ because He was a threat. And He still is. The more we live like Jesus, the more we obey His commandments and share His grace, the more of a problem we become for the status quo, for the powers that be.

“They’ve called Me the devil,” Jesus says. “What then do you imagine that they will call you? Yet you mustn’t let that hold you back. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light. What you hear Me whisper, proclaim from the housetops. For you must have no fear of them.” That’s something of a refrain in our reading for this morning. “Have no fear. Do not fear. Do not be afraid.” Three times He says it, within half a dozen verses. Things will get bad; that’s the job. Be bold and faithful and fearless.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” Jesus asks. “Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father. Even the hairs of your head have been counted.” God is with you, Jesus tells us. He sees you, He knows you, He loves you. “And everyone who acknowledges Me, I will acknowledge in Heaven.” Christ will not let us go, will not leave us orphaned. Often in times of trouble, in times of suffering, we want to know where God is, whether He notices, whether He cares.

“Oh, He cares,” Jesus promises. “He cares about every sparrow, every hair. Nothing that He has made goes without the awareness, the presence, the mercy of our Father. God is always with you, especially when it feels like He’s not.

Yet now Jesus goes for the jugular. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” quoth the Prince of Peace. “I have come not to bring peace but a sword! For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” This of course is rhetoric, but maybe not hyperbole. Revelation reveals that the only sword borne by Jesus is the sword of His mouth. Christ has come to reconcile, not to bring us strife. But the world will resist, the way that a child rejects her medicine, or a patient fears the scalpel.

The teachings of Christ are contentious; they remain so to this day. I have heard of pastors criticized, shouted down, for preaching the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, turning the other cheek—the most basic instructions of Jesus, now considered woke or weak. The cruel old gods of blood and soil reassert themselves in sin. We’re all for showing compassion to our neighbor, so long as we can limit who that is. But the farther Jesus pushes back the boundary—from Israelites to Samaritans to the Black Jews of Ethiopia to God-fearing Greeks and even the God-damned Romans—the more that we resist.

Continuing on that thread of one’s enemies arising in one’s own household, He continues: “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever does not take up the Cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me.” And that’s a real gut-punch, isn’t it? It was hard for me, as a child, to imagine loving Jesus more than my Mom. She’s my Mom. And as a parent, if anything, it is harder to imagine loving Jesus more than our children.

But keep in mind what He is saying. Jesus isn’t telling us to reject or abandon our loved ones. He loved His Mother, He loved His friends, and He would have us do the same. What He’s trying to convey is that we must break down our notions of family, of nation, of tribe, in order to reroot them on firmer ground, in healthier soil. And it isn’t about being worthy. None of us is worthy of the Christ.

Remember what Jesus said when someone called out to Him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Jesus immediately replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it!” Now that is not a slam against His Mother. Rather, He is saying, “I do not value My Mother simply for blood-ties but for her love of God, for her spirituality, for the faith in which she raised Me.” Elsewhere He likewise states, “Whoever does the will of God is My mother and My brother and My sister.”

Again, that’s not a rejection of Joseph or of Mary. Several of Jesus’ Apostles appear to be related to Him by blood. Yet His community, His Body, His Church is bigger than that. Once we recognize the Fatherhood of God, we must embrace the brotherhood of Man. All children of the Father are my brothers and my sisters. And that includes my neighbor, and the stranger, and my enemy—which is, admittedly, a rather tall order, as He warns us.

There’s a lovely old poem, which I often think of in relation to this passage. It deals with a Royalist in England’s Civil War, whose lover begs him not to fight but remain with her in peace. If he loves her, she implores, then he should not go. And he says to her: “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Lov’d I not honour more.” Were he not a man of principle and valor, he would not be the man whom she loves. He would be lesser. The fact that he has a higher love, a higher truth, to which he must stay true, allows him to love her more deeply than would otherwise be possible. He has to do this because of his love.

That’s what Christ is getting at when He tells His disciples that we must love Him more. When we put Him first, when we put God first in our lives, our other loves do not diminish; they intensify. For the love of God is limitless and overflowing. If I love God more than my mother, more than my wife, more than my daughter, then I am both freed and empowered to love them all more fervently than I could ever have hoped to before. Or as C.S. Lewis more pithily put it: “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”

This is what most fascinated and horrified the ancient Romans with regards to the early Church: that Christians treated everyone as family. “They love all people, even those who persecute them,” marvels the Epistle to Diognetus. “See how they love one another,” Tertullian records. The pagans around them found such unfettered, indiscriminate, self-sacrificial love at once both beautiful and perverse. That is why they murdered us. And that is why we won.

In short, our passage today from Matthew’s Gospel recounts Jesus’ warning to His followers: act like Christ, and the world will treat you like Christ; the world will nail you to the Cross. But have no fear, for God is ever with you, and He loves every hair upon your head. Do not fear even those who would destroy the body, for only One can destroy both the body and the soul—and He shall raise us all to life from the loamy earth of the grave.

It all boils down to the last command of Christ: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Pick up your cross, O Christian, and entertain no fear. For death is not our end.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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