10:21 Persecution By One's Own Family
Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death
Jesus’ view of the situation to come for the Church is worse than at the beginning of this passage. Now when the twelve are delivered up it will be by their own kinsmen, and the penalty is to be capital punishment rather than flogging. The escalation of response to the mission of the twelve again suggests a larger audience than merely Galilee, and Davies and Allison say that it is clearly an expression of the post-Easter situation of the twelve.
The sense of eschatology is heightened because this verse alludes to Micah 7:6, which is eschatological in theme. Such conflict within families was seen as ‘a sign of the End’ in Jewish apocrypha.
The ‘deliver up’ and being put to death point to execution by authorities. This is in continuity with the echo of verses 17 and 19, which dealt with being accused before the sanhedrins. The same word is used in 10:4 of Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus.
Read more about this topic: Coming Persecutions
Famous quotes containing the words persecution and/or family:
“That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages among some [people] and to their eternal Infamy the clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)