Hebrews 11.29 – 12.2, Luke 12.49–56
The Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 17 August 2025
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
It troubles me to hear Jesus saying, ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!’ Can this be the same Jesus who went about healing, restoring people to a full life, and preaching a gospel of love for all? Clearly it is the same Jesus, so what does this mean?
We’ll return to this question soon, but first, another troubling but necessary theme: for I think it is time to say that we need to talk about Israel.
We need to talk about Israel because today we stand witness to the extreme aggression of the current State of Israel against the Palestinian people, and as our Christian faith is intimately bound up with the historical faith of these semitic peoples, it gives rise to many troubling questions for us.
Can this country, whose leaders have arrest warrants against them for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a weapon of war, be the same Israel who God once called ‘a light to the nations’? Can this country, founded on a vision of peaceable life in ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’, be the same Israel which has reduced Gaza to rubble, whilst remorselessly destroying its civilian people? [1]
Because we have only a short time, and because I’m no expert on Middle Eastern politics or history, I can only humbly offer a brief and limited reflection, which goes like this:
In the biblical story we see that Israel’s people have been in turns victims and victimisers, oppressors and the oppressed, and through this history their relationship with God has been a cycle of obedience and disobedience. In those times of disobedience God has raised up prophets – including Jesus – to pronounce judgement on Israel, and to call the nation back to righteousness.
But Christians believe that Jesus was more than a prophet. For, in the New Testament, is ‘this extraordinary event – which means that the true Israel today is neither Jews nor Israelis, but believers in the Messiah, even if they are gentiles’. [2]
Jesus stunned his contemporaries by saying that many are going to come from the North and the South and the East and the West, from all the gentile nations. They are going to sit down in a Messianic banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Some of the citizens of the kingdom who are descended physically from Jacob are going to be excluded from the kingdom. So some of the Israelites are not true Israel and many of the gentiles who are not Israelites are the true Israel. [3]
This brings us back to the troubling statement of Jesus with which we began:
‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?’ He said. ‘No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, households will be divided, three against two and two against three; fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law – each against the other.’
Whilst his followers expected Jesus to bring peace to the troubled family of Israel, here he’s telling them that he’ll do the opposite. He is preaching that the values of the kingdom of God supersede Israel’s family values, and that those who embrace his values would come into conflict with those who resisted them: to the extent that family members would disagree. [4]
In Jesus’ day family loyalty was a major symbol of Israeli identity; it was an obligation at the heart of that society. Jesus saw that people brought up believing that charity began – and ended – at home would struggle to embrace the consequences of his message of love and care for all people – particularly the outsider and even the enemy. He realised that, by extension, people who assumed that they were a chosen nation, elevated above all others, would struggle with the consequences of his message that the kingdom of God was for all people – including their near neighbours;. He saw that people who believed that their land was promised exclusively to them, would fiercely resist the consequences of his message that the kingdom of God knows no geographical bounds.
If Jesus was taking a sword to anything, it was to the idea of Israel being a chosen people in a land of promise. That was before. Now, the good news extended to all peoples: now everyone, in all places, by faith in Christ, can become children of God. When someone told Jesus, ‘Your mother and your brothers are outside, wanting to see you,’ he replied, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’ [5]
Jesus saw that family loyalty, in essence a good thing, had become an idol to Israel. Because,
– if we never welcome outsiders to our table;
– if, in securing the boundaries of our home, we make an enemy of our neighbour;
– if storing up our treasure for ourselves means we despoil the earth and deny others food;
– then we’ve made an idol of the family or the nation and turned our backs on the ways of God.
When family life or the life of a nation becomes a clannish affair, closed-off against all neighbours, this is disobedience against the ways of God.
The true Israel, Jesus taught, consists of those who embrace the values of the kingdom of God, who seek to follow the ways of the Messiah in this new way of human relating which is unbounded by space, place, citizenship or race.
Once called the People of the Book, Israel today is much more a People of the Gun, intent on establishing a Jewish Zionist state by military force. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel from 1948, once wrote, “We must do everything to insure (the Palestinians) never do return,” and in a 1938 speech said, “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves: politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come and settle here.” [6]
The result is endless armed conflict: “The biggest cause of war is fear and insecurity, and the way to end war is to remove the causes of fear and insecurity.” [7] “Zionism, which was allegedly intended to remove Jewish insecurity by building a Jewish State, has led to greatly intensifying insecurities in Israel.” There is a terrible irony in that “Jews who frequently rain death on Palestinians and others feel insecure, much more insecure than any Jews abroad.” [8]
So, yes, we do need to talk about Israel today – and more than anything we need to talk to God about Israel, and listen for what God might be saying.
Let us pray without ceasing for an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Let us pray for the peace of Israel: for an end to the cycle of violence, for a laying-down of arms.
Let us pray that the desire to possess and to dominate may give way to a desire to show mercy, grace and generosity.
Let us pray for the Church to strengthen our support for all people of goodwill in that region.
Let us pray for Christians, Jews, Muslims and all humanitarians who are engaged together in the holy work of reconciliation.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Israeli war crimes in the Gaza war; Wikipedia: Light unto the nations; Deuteronomy 26.9.
[2] John Stott, The Place of Israel. Stephen Sizer blog, 15 May 2023.
[3] John Stott, The Place of Israel. Stephen Sizer blog, 15 May 2023.
[4] See my Christian Family Values: interpreting the times, preached in Yorkshire, 2019.
[5] Matthew 10.34-36; Luke 8.19-21.
[6] David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar, Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, p.157; Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, pp.91-2;
[7] Steve Hayes, Peace in Ukraine? A media circus and a damp squib. Christianity and Society Forum, 16 August 2025.
[8] Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation, pp.48, 67.
