Introduction
The lectionary is following the same scene/speech from Jesus (just skipping a rather violent parable) that we’ve been hearing the last two weeks. But, if you have folks that have been on vacation or if you’ve preached on some of the other texts, this text might feel out of nowhere for your folks. So, let’s reset the scene a little bit.
Narrative Context
This lectionary text drops us into the middle of a long section of Luke’s Gospel where Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem, teaching about life in God’s kingdom. In the chapters leading up to this text, Jesus has been reorienting his followers’ imaginations. Generosity is better than stockpiling wealth. God’s care frees us from anxiety. Discipleship requires watchfulness and readiness. These teachings have been inspiring, but they have also been unsettling, because they reorder priorities and disrupt assumptions. Now, in this passage, Jesus takes away any illusions that following him will be comfortable or universally welcomed. He says plainly that his coming brings fire, and not peace but division.
That honesty is worth pausing on. These words have often been heard as a caution. “Follow me and you might lose your family.” But in Luke’s context they are less a threat and more the truth-telling of a leader who refuses to sugarcoat what the road ahead will hold.
Audience Context
There’s a two–three audience connection here. First, there’s the very early church audience. The years immediately following Jesus’ death and resurrection, before Luke’s Gospel was written. To oversimplify it, in this period some believed Jesus was the Messiah and followed him, while others did not (Luke recounts this dynamic in Acts). Those divisions often ran right through households. Villages were split over his ministry. Some were drawn in by his healings, his welcome of outsiders, and his announcement that God’s kingdom was breaking in; others were offended, unsettled, or outright threatened.
But by the time Luke is writing, the situation has shifted into a second context. Luke is likely compiling his Gospel in a Greco-Roman urban setting (somewhere like Ephesus or Corinth) between roughly 85 and 100 CE. Paul’s message had already been circulating for decades. Since then, churches had been planted, grown, and wrestled with their own internal tensions. Factions had formed. As Paul’s letters to the Corinthians show so vividly, some congregations became places where the wealthy feasted while the poor went hungry, where status and self-interest outweighed love of neighbor. For Luke’s audience, the “division” Jesus names was not only between those who believed in him and those who did not, it was also within the believing community itself. Between those who embodied the radical ethic of the kingdom and those who resisted its demands even while claiming the name of Christ.
Luke’s telling of Jesus’ words, then, would have landed with a double edge. Reminding the church of its roots in a movement that divided households and confronting it with the truth that the gospel can still bring division when its call to love, justice, and humility challenges the comfortable patterns of the faithful.
Back the Gospel and its Division
In the text, Jesus describes this division with words that echo the prophet Micah (7:6), who spoke of family members turning on one another in a time of covenant crisis. He is not instructing his followers to create conflict for conflict’s sake. He is simply being honest that allegiance to God’s kingdom will, at times, fracture even our closest relationships.
Fire has that effect. In the stories of the prophets, fire is the heat of God’s purifying word, burning away injustice and falsehood. In Acts, fire is the Spirit’s power igniting a new community. When that fire catches, it changes things. It refines, it reshapes, it refuses to leave the world as it is. And that will not always be welcome news.
Even though Jesus has been baptized by John, the “baptism” Jesus speaks of here is almost certainly his coming death. He feels the weight of it already as he continues to Jerusalem. This baptism is the full immersion of his life into God’s saving work. A work that will bring freedom and healing but will also expose and confront whatever stands in the way. Jesus will go all the way to the cross for the sake of that work. His words in this passage are a reminder to his followers that they too will meet resistance when they live by the values of the kingdom he proclaims.
That kingdom vision, laid out earlier in Luke, is expansive: to love neighbors and enemies, to welcome strangers and outcasts, to give generously and to reject scarcity, and to proclaim that God’s grace and reign are for everyone. Every single person.
It is a vision that lifts up the lowly and brings down the powerful, as Mary sang in chapter one. It is a vision that cannot be stopped by the boundaries we draw. And precisely because it is so inclusive, it will offend those who benefit from exclusion. It is always easier to stay with what we know than to learn from someone different. It is always easier to protect our comfort than to open ourselves to change.
Preaching Possibilities
This Gospel Message is Just as True Today
Many of us assume that because we are 2,000 year later, that things have changed. That inclusion should be the norm. That our systems are better and actually care for the least, the last, and the lost. But our world proves otherwise. Messages of hate, exclusion, supremacy, and power are running rampant. Luke’s audience knew that living out God’s kingdom would draw fire from those who feared losing their power. We still live in that reality.
In online spaces, white supremacist groups actively target young white men with messages of hate. Christian organizations lobby to remove books from schools because a character has two moms or because a book names the realities of the Holocaust or slavery. Politicians and pundits repeat rhetoric that labels those seeking assistance as freeloaders or welfare queens. These are not abstract or rare occurrences. They are concrete places right around us where the belovedness of our neighbors is either questioned or denied. These voices promote the pursuit of isolation and independence at the expense of others. They promote an ideology of succeeding and profiting at all costs, no matter who may be impacted or harmed. All that matters is me, my family, my legacy, my kingdom.
But this is antithetical to the life-giving community and kingdom of our God that is proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so, Jesus tells us that when the church rejects those other voices and instead insists on honoring that belovedness, it will meet resistance because the voices of power will resist messages that call us to share that power and privilege.
Jesus’ honesty here is a gift, because it prepares us for reality.
For preachers, this passage offers the chance to move away from reading it as a dire warning and toward hearing it as radical honesty. It is a reminder that living the gospel in its fullness will, at times, disrupt the comfort of those around us. But that disruption is not the end of the story. The same fire that refines also warms and gives light as we gather around it in community. The same baptism that costs Jesus his life also opens the way to resurrection. In that promise, we are sustained together for the divisions and challenges we will inevitably face.
When the divisions come, we do not face them alone. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, past and present. We are held in the body of Christ. And we are carried by the Spirit whose fire still burns, refining and renewing the world God loves. Jesus is honest about the road ahead. And in that honesty there is both realism and hope.
Micah Krey 
Leave a comment