It’s embarrassing for the socially comfortable Christian: Jesus’s talk of peaceless division. What does he mean saying children will be divided from their parents, that it’s not peace he brings?

The answer is simple, but it’s difficult for Christians today to hear it, much less accept it. That’s because today we Christians are heir to cultural legacies of power. Christians for centuries now have been the guardians and guarantors of families, societies, and nations. For a long time, we’ve ruled the world. Today, of course, we may no longer rule, but we’re at least good citizens; we can be counted on to fit the form and toe the line of civilization and good manners. Today we Christians are not people of peaceless division, but rather conformity. We’ve been such for almost 2,000 years now. And it’s why this passage from Luke 12:49-53 is hard to understand. It’s why we don’t get it.

We don’t get it that Jesus called together disciples into a new family of love, in union with the God, intimate union—communion. We don’t get that this family Jesus birthed and formed, collected from all sorts of different people, was to be the determinative form of human sociableness in the world until the coming of the kingdom at the end of time. That is, we don’t get that Jesus did not come to create nations, nor to undergird nations, but that he came to form a people called Church, who love radically the same way he did and who suffered nonviolently just as he did. That is, somewhere along the way we made the critical error of thinking that being Christians make us good citizens, good members of society. But that’s never been the case. Or, at least, it never should have been the case. Christians, rather, were meant to be a threat to society, insofar as society remained unconverted, unruled by genuine love. This is the great tragedy of Christian history.

Now what this means, very simply, is that Christians must rediscover their outlier, outcast, radical status. We must relearn the fact that we are not meant to be good citizens and pliant members of society, but instead good disciples. We must understand that our task is conflict: to love the way Jesus would have us love and willingly to suffer for it. We are not meant to prop up anything in society, nor any relationship no matter how intimate, if it runs contrary to the love Christ demands we practice. We Christians are too pagan; we go too much with the flow. And it’s why people see right through us, and why they will continue to do so until we finally see through ourselves and repent and live genuinely as Christians, loving and suffering radically. As the Bible says.

So, the question is this: How has following Christ caused conflict in your life? If it has, rejoice, for as Jesus said, your reward will be great in heaven. But if it hasn’t, beware. Because you may not be a Christian, no matter how much you say you are. Because talk is indeed very cheap.