Today's Gospel passage poses a great challenge for our understanding of Jesus as Jesus seems to be contradicting what any Jew, or indeed any human being, would expect from God or God's messiah. When Jesus speaks about setting people at odds with each other, he is pointing to human problems and expectation, and is asserting that he did not come to solve such problems. Jesus did not come to rid the world of problems but to respond to the evil that affects our world by bringing love. Pope Benedict in his trilogy Jesus of Nazareth raises this question in another form: "If Jesus did not bring peace and prosperity and freedom, what did he bring?" He answers: Jesus brought God, and God is love.

When we look on God or Jesus as problem solvers, we have reduced the great mystery of the Incarnation and the salvation which Jesus won for us on the cross to a mere human strategy or, worse, to a gimmick. While Jesus did heal people of illnesses and so, in a certain sense, did "solve some problem" those miracles must rather be seen as manifestations of God's love and as promises. That the love manifested and offered to us on the cross will always finally conquer evil and all its particular manifestations.