The Violent Peace of Jesus
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Scripture: Matthew 10:34-42
There is a kind of restlessness that comes with wanting more without wanting to change. We reach for improvement — a better version of what we already have, a life supplemented rather than transformed. The instinct is understandable. Change is costly, and the self clings to what it knows.
But the Christian tradition has always insisted that what God offers is not a supplement to life but a substitution for it. The ancient language of dying and rising, of losing one's life to find it, is not metaphor dressed up as doctrine. It points to something genuinely disruptive: that the life God gives is not our life, improved, but God's own life, given in exchange for ours.
This exchange requires us to loosen our grip on the things that feel most like solid ground — security, comfort, the approval of those we love, the familiar shapes of our days. Not because these things are evil, but because they can become the floor we stand on when God is calling us to swim.
The Spirit, as the ancient Hebrew makes plain, is breath. And breath is not something we hold. It is something that moves through us. We cannot store it or grip it. We can only continue to receive it.
This is the shape of the Christian life: open hands, not clenched ones. Not an accumulation of virtue or achievement, but a continual receiving of what God freely offers. The one who has nothing to offer but themselves has everything that is needed, because God asks only for the self — and gives, in return, a life far larger than the one surrendered.
Reflection Questions
What are the things in your life that feel most like solid ground — the things you would be least willing to loosen your grip on?
Where have you experienced following God as genuinely costly, and what did that cost reveal about what you were holding onto?
How would you describe the difference between a life that includes God and a life that is given to God?
What would it look like to approach the coming week with open hands — genuinely available to be redirected — rather than asking God to bless what you've already decided?
What does it mean to you that no circumstance, failure, or inadequacy removes your ability to give yourself wholly to God?
