Progressive reflections on the lectionary #77

Monday 11th August 2025

Luke 12:49-56 Jesus has a 'go' at the family unit.

This week I am looking at the passage in Luke which showcases some of Jesus less ‘meek and mild’ attitudes: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!… Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Rather than accept the prevailing, imo rather shallow, sense that this has to do with religious identity, I see this as a critique of the oppressive power of the family unit in first century Palestine.

“Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning...” is the first half of a weather forecasting saying that I grew up knowing well, as the son of a shepherd. When my own children were younger this somehow became ‘red sky in the morning, shepherds in the awning…’ and led to some dispute about whether this was ‘always a joke’ or whether the person who coined it had, in fact originally believed this was the saying.

The passage this week ends with a weather based saying, but begins with a few lines about family disputes. Luke’s Jesus has a few things to say about family, from effectively redefining it in chapter 8, telling people to be ready to leave it in chapter 9, to stories of inheritance disputes in chapters 12 and 15, for instance.

In this passage Jesus declares that he brings division, not peace, even within families, which were the all important unit of social organisation.

In first-century Palestine, the extended family was the fundamental social unit - economically, religiously, and politically. People who found themselves dislocated from the protection and belonging that family, and its patriarch, provided were in a seriously dangerous position. Survival outside of an extended family, or household, was scarcely conceivable.

Enter the radical, socially redefining early Christian movement. Here was a movement that offered a new kind of family structure - without relying on ties of blood or lineage. Kinship meant something else here, and so these new communities drew in those who were dislocated from their family structures, forming new communities that challenged the prevailing norms of hierarchy and honour.

When I visited Fiji I went for a walk one day when a torrential downpour appeared out of nowhere. I ran for shelter to a bench with a metal canopy over it. It soon became clear to me that this was ‘home’ for two men whose few belongings were gathered up in plastic bags there. I began talking to them, and found they were both living there as part of bail conditions, having committed some unspecified crimes in their home communities. They would not, I found out, be allowed back to their villages.

“So where will you go?” I asked. “I will need to find another village,” explained one man, the less taciturn of the two. Without belonging to a community, their lives were effectively over. What is true for a Pacific islander in the 21st century was surely much truer of a peasant in first century Palestine. Early Christian communities became that unusual option, ‘another village’.

For people without the safety net of family in that society, options were few. A real possibility for the most desperate was selling oneself into slavery. This might have taken the shape of voluntary slavery, where selling yourself would secure food, shelter, or protection. Alternatively an option might be indentured servitude, in Jewish law, there were provisions for what was effectively time limited slavery (e.g., Exodus 21, Leviticus 25), although Roman practices were harsher and more permanent. Those who didn’t want to take either option could try to migrate to urban centres like Sepphoris or Jerusalem, where they could become day labourers (this, I think, is what Jesus was), beggars, or alternatively domestic slaves. We dramatically overlook the amount of slavery present in the gospels - it was rife in that world. My theory about Luke, the evangelist, is that he too was enslaved.

Of course the flip side of this is that it gave the family unit enormous power, the patriarch of the family really controlled the lives of those under his authority, the ‘father’ in that context was in a very strong position. Even 2000+ years later this has carried over to some degree - to my amazement some people still ask other men for their ‘daughter’s hand in marriage’ - a tradition that comes directly from the time when women were economic vessels, to be passed from one man to another. The rows about ‘traditional’ or ‘biblical’ marriage claim to be about sexuality, but completely ignore the fact that in ‘Bible time’ societies marriage was an entirely economic transaction, it was about the exchange of property. The whole thing was full of power and control, and so we get Jesus’ words of division:

From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law… 12:52-53

Crossan’s view, which I share, is that these are probably the only ‘authentic’ words of Jesus recorded in this passage. They are surrounded by editorialising by Luke. If you want a neat demonstration of the way that the evangelists curated and created their narratives to serve their agendas, look at verses 58-59 where you will find one of the “Q sayings”, which Matthew (5: 25-26) treats quite differently. Which of them was using the saying most authentically? Scholars lean towards Luke, but who knows?

Anyway, back to our passage for today: Taken on their own these words reflect a stunning critique of the power dynamics present in family structures of the time, families after all were the means of controlling power, wealth, land and, ultimately, lives.

I know that for many this is a passage about faith and unbelief, but if you’ll forgive me, I think that’s a shallow reading, I struggle to see clear evidence of Jesus working in that sort of paradigm. According to Luke, though, Jesus was certainly active in critiquing the injustice and control of prevailing power structures. All this makes the passage not a call to sectarianism but a profound challenge to the entrenched hierarchies of the time.

This blog is taken from Simon's Substack email series, to subscribe please go to https://simonjcross.substack.c...

Image: Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash