Not Peace, But a Sword - Reflections on Matthew 10:24-39, Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Today we are faced with a most troublesome and potentially dangerous passage. I am writing this essay at a time when US America is engaged in a war with Iran, a war that was begun by President Trump on what appears to be false assumptions, namely that Iran was on the verge of some sort of attack against the US. There seems to be no proof of that claim, but nevertheless the war continues, and Iranian citizens, including many children, have died and US service men and woman in the region remain at great risk.
This context takes on a somewhat sinister cast when we listen to Matthew’s words, spoken by Jesus, when he says, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. I have come to divide a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s enemies will be members of his own household” (Mt.10:34-36). And just what are we to make of that sort of talk?
Language like this, when lifted out of context, can be used, and has been used, in all manner of nefarious ways. In our time of a militant Christian nationalism, where there is great confusion concerning just whom we are called to worship—God or the nation—it is a simple matter merely to quote these lines and announce that Jesus himself has called for us sharply to divide our communities between those who are “with us” from those who are “against us.” Once that operation has occurred, the next step is to generate a deep hatred of those we have determined are “against us.” Thus, we are left with a fractured community, intent more on despising those we consider enemies rather than searching for some sort of common ground, listening for ways to lessen tensions rather than exacerbate them. And at the extreme edge of all this, we find wars, as we US Americans are currently engaged in in Iran.
However, despite the ease with which certain readers move from these words to a sort of universal command that Jesus speaks here for sharp divisions between members of the human family, an eschatological warfare between those in the right and the despicable enemy, in other Matthean language we hear notions quite different indeed. Here is Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed (happy) are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt.5:9). One of Jesus’s main goals for his ministry is to train people in the ways that lead them to become “children of God;” hence to be a peacemaker, he says in his famous sermon, is a sure way to become such a child. In addition, at 5:44, also during that sermon, Matthew records Jesus as saying: “You have heard that it is said, ‘You shall love your neighbor, but hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven’” (Mt.5:43-45). Note again, the goal is to become a child of God, and another way to gain that goal, like being a peacemaker, is to love your enemies, surely among the very hardest of the commands that Jesus is remembered to have spoken. Would that the world’s peoples would take that sharp command with the seriousness in which it was uttered! Clearly, Matthew had no intention whatever to suggest that Jesus at 10:34-36 meant that the world was to be be given over to the sword; Jesus was not imagined by Matthew to be the “prince of the sword,” rather than the “prince of peace.”
What Matthew does emphasize in this text is that any decision for the gospel, any notion that one has to follow Jesus, is necessarily accompanied by some difficult choices. It is very true, says Matthew, that to become a true disciple of Jesus Messiah will require some potentially painful options. It may well be that one’s closest family members, fathers, mothers, in-laws, among them, may be aghast as you announce that Jesus will now be your master. No doubt, many households in the first century were upended by such decisions, and the uproar that ensued seemed far more like a sword than any idea of peace. Jesus here is a demanding taskmaster, and to become a Christian follower, he warns, is no easy resolution. However easy many find it in our own time to be a Christian—come to church, sing in the choir, give some money—in Jesus’s day that was hardly the case.
Perhaps ironically, Matthew in this passage hears in the background of this text a painful pericope from the 8th century BCE prophet Micah. In a very dark passage, describing the total corruption of the people of Israel in his day, Micah portrays a collapsing community: “Put no trust in a friend; have no confidence in a loved one; guard the doors of your mouth even from her who lies in your embrace! A son treats his father with contempt; a daughter rises against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; your enemies are members of your own household” (Micah 7:5-6). Micah’s corrupt Israel in Matthew’s imagination becomes the potential community of the early Christians, sharply divided by the demands of Jesus to follow in the ways of peacemaking and in the difficult way of loving their enemies.
Our current leaders, thinking themselves Christians, actual followers of Jesus, wage war against those thought to be enemies, employing without thought the language of Mt.10. They forget, to their peril and ours, that Jesus called us to a new way of living, a way of peace, a way of enemy love that, he warns, is bound to bring difficult divisions among peoples of any age. And so it does, as the many outcries against our current Iranian war make plain. The “sword” that Jesus brings is hardly literal; it is the metaphorical sword of hard choices, of loving choices, of caring for all the world, that forever divides people who would rather continue the old ways of conflict and hatred. When will we ever learn?