Reflection — “Disturbing the Peace” 17th August 2025 

Luke 12:49–56 by Rev Dr Fei Taule’ale’ausumai 

I recently went to watch the movie Bonhoeffer. I know some of you had mixed feelings about it but I really enjoyed it.  You can compare it with an earlier film of him on You Tube or Netflix and compare them.  One of the sayings he is purported as saying is:  

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. … Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” —however, according to some scholars they say that there’s no evidence Dietrich Bonhoeffer actually said or wrote this.  

One commentator Matthew Lewis says what Bonhoeffer actually said in his unpublished work Ethics, which he was writing during his imprisonment—do address the moral seriousness of inaction. In one passage, was: 

“The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenceless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.” Andrew DeCort 

This underscores what many mean when paraphrasing him as saying silence can be worse than violence itself: the refusal to speak up or act in the face of extreme injustice implicates someone morally, especially if they’ve remained silent about the suffering of others.  Ultimately failing to resist or speak out against evil can make one complicit—is indeed central to Bonhoeffer’s ethical vision his work powerfully affirms the moral urgency of speaking and acting against injustice. 

And so it is too when we read Luke 12 “I came to bring division, not peace”—and they unsettle us.
We want Jesus meek and mild, the baby in the manger, the Prince of Peace who stills the storm.
But here, he speaks as one who sets a fire.
And not the warm glow of a candle, but the searing flame that clears a field. 

Debie Thomas the author of a Faith of many rooms reminds us: this is not a prescription for quarrelling, but a description of what happens when truth confronts false peace.
There is a peace that is nothing more than polite silence in the face of injustice.
There is a peace that prefers comfort over compassion, denial over disruption.
And Jesus will disturb that peace. 

Another woman scholar Jerusha Matsen Neal at Duke Divinity says Luke’s gospel has always held peace and conflict together—Mary’s Magnificat was already turning the world upside down.
When Jesus talks about bringing division instead of peace it burns away the illusions that unity can exist without justice.  She calls us to discernment—to read the signs and context of our own time—and to admit that sometimes “getting along” is just another way of keeping the cross at arm’s length. 

Can you recall a time in your own life where you have kept silence for fear of disturbing the so-called peace?   

I’m sure many of you like me have witnessed violence and abuse and have not known what to do, what to say particularly in cultures where you must know your place.  Turn away, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  Just as an aside this saying referring to the 3 monkeys began as an ancient moral principle in India → was translated and carried into China via Buddhism → then took on the monkey pun in Japan and was brought to the West by travellers in the late 19th century and then shifted in meaning to imply wilful blindness or silence in the face of wrongdoing.   

I was invited to the opening of the academic year at Malua Theological College in Samoa a few years ago.  I was sitting at the head table with VIP guests and the principal.  During the ceremony a child was being disruptive and the principal instead of approaching the parents to control their child, he went straight up to the child and wacked him so hard the child literally went flying.  No one said or did anything, the parents just sat there stunned and silent.  Afterall, it must have been their fault.  The principal a man of God, can never be wrong.  Later that night when the first year students were performing a dance, one of the wives was wearing sunglasses and the principal stopped the performance and singled out the faletua (wife).  And asked, “why are you wearing sunglasses?”  She just stood there, and he said the only reason you would be wearing sunglasses inside the building at night is because you are trying to hide something.  Let me tell you now, if you are hiding a black eye, both you and your husband in the future will be expelled if this continues to happen.  We will not tolerate violence in our college.  Can you believe it, this is after he attacked one of the most vulnerable and innocent of all, a child?   

Up until the end of my high school years in the late nineteen seventies corporal punishment in schools was a given, you broke the rules and you got caned or strapped.  They gradually weaned that out I remember being given lines to write,  I never once got the strap.  However, in many homes family violence and abuse took many forms both physical, sexual and immoral.  I remember my girlfriends up the next street telling me “dad comes into our bedroom every night and we can see him doing things to our sister” so far he hasn’t touched me.  That sister did get pregnant to him.  Her older half sister, ran away and began a new life in Christchurch.  Eventually once the pregnancy could not be hidden social welfare found out through the school and the father was imprisoned, and the child adopted out.  Uncannily, that child is a friend of mine here in Wellington and his biological mother remains a dear friend of mine to this very day.  But she refuses to meet him because he is a reminder of that traumatic and horrific violence and abuse which was never talked about.  Sadly, her mother accepted her husband back into the family home after he was released from prison.  He remained in the family home right up until his dying day all the while the daughter continuing to be the dutiful daughter in silence along with her younger sisters.  I was only a kid in primary school.  I just listened as a friend to friend, I didn’t know that you could challenge this kind of abuse back then?  For many then and still today, sexual violence, physical abuse for many has become normalised and considered part of everyday life.  That’s life, that’s what one puts up with, that’s just the way things are.  I say, NOT ANYMORE! 

Many of you here who grew up during the war knew that to be a pacifist i.e. antiwar you would be punished for not going to war and for standing up for peace.  Today we live in a completely different world we are lived streamed the violence and bloodshed daily on our television and phone screens.  Chloe Swarbrick the leader of the Green Party gets expelled from parliament for a week for naming it and shaming it.  We live in a society that calls for complicity.  Silence is complicity and complicity is equivalent to the crime itself.  We can also be perpetrators through our silence.   

When Jesus says in Luke 12:51 “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division”, he is warning that his message will not always unite people but often divide them. 

The division isn’t his ultimate goal— Jesus mission is reconciliation and life—but the effect of his radical call to follow him is that families, communities, and societies may split. Some will embrace the way of Christ, dothers will resist it. 

Our call as a church and we here at St Andrew’s on the Terrace do try our best to do this is to confront and name people and the systems that harm—racism, violence in all its forms, economic exploitation, environmental abuse.  Division can be a sign like this Lukan reading suggests that what does not belong to God’s justice system needs to go.  It is not a reason to despair, but a reason to lean into honest, courageous conversation. 

In a nutshell, Jesus’ gospel exposes loyalties and forces choices, and in doing so, it can bring conflict before it brings true peace.   

This Lukan text does not give us permission to be argumentative for arguments sake, it gives us a sober reminder: that the gospel is not always welcomed; sometimes it will set family against family, church member against church member, neighbour against neighbour.  Not because we relish conflict, but because love that tells the truth will always disturb and disrupt.  Justice must come before any peace, and that peace is not just the absent of conflict but the presence of life in all its fullness, wholistic, life building, justice, compassionate love then there is peace.  . 

So we pray for courage—
Courage to let Jesus through us disturb the peace that needs disturbing.
Courage to name injustice even when it costs us relationships.
Courage to trust that beyond the division, there is a deeper peace,
one shaped by the justice, mercy, and reconciling love of God. 

Amen. 

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