Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XX per Annum C
14 August 2022

The Gospel presents an image of Jesus that can seem out of place or unlikely.  Certainly, many people in our day, including many Christians, find today’s Gospel image of Jesus incomprehensible.  It is the image of Jesus who announces that he has come not for peace but for division.  In modern culture there is great emphasis on the values of “unity” and “tolerance”, though those ideas often lack substance in the modern mind and are used simply to mean that differences and divisions should be overlooked in order to keep everyone together for the sake of keeping together.  The idea that the Lord comes to stir things up is often outright dismissed as an impossibility.  But then we have to face today’s Gospel passage.

In the Gospel the Lord refers to his mission.  He notes that he has come to set the earth on fire and he notes that there is a baptism that he is in great anguish to accomplish.  The reference to baptism calls to mind the image of water.  And so, we have the symbols in today’s Gospel of both water and fire.  In the ancient world, and especially familiar to us in the Scriptures, water and fire are symbols of destruction.  We can think of the early events of creation in the Book of Genesis, of the disorder that sin brought into the world and how God’s response in the days of Noah was to send a great flood to destroy things and begin anew.  Being plunged into, or immersed into, water is a symbol of being overwhelmed and drowned.  Judgment.  Destruction.  And fire is also a clear symbol and is especially evocative of judgment and the end of things when Scripture makes reference to the world being consumed and dissolved by fire.

So, there is one obvious purpose when the Lord uses symbols of water and fire.  He means to communicate that he has come to claim God’s sovereignty over His creation.  That sovereignty and its demands for fidelity, especially from creatures like us with freedom, means we have a choice to make.  And by it we will be judged.  We must acknowledge God’s rights and primacy over us and all creation.  We cannot prefer other things or other relationships to the one He has made with us.  The primacy of relationship with God is brought to the fore by that image of division within family.  We cannot live rightly with God or truly follow Him while also preferring other relationships ahead of him.  Rather, the claim of sovereignty by the Lord means a father will be divided against his son, a mother against her daughter and so forth.  We who call ourselves disciples have to weigh carefully the demands and the gift of being in relationship with God while also noting and taking care so that other relationships are nurtured, but do not become the excuse for disobedience to God.  With the very common tendency to want to “fit in” in modern life we need to take this Gospel to heart because it can be very easy to be swept along with the mentalities of those who adopt a false Gospel that makes no demands on us.

The desire to fit in and to not be challenged, or to not be challenging, was a reality seen in the time of the Prophet Jeremiah too.  Jeremiah received the tough mission to speak God’s word and to proclaim the infidelity of God’s people.  He preached that God’s judgment would be seen in the destruction of the Temple.  And for delivering those words, Jeremiah’s contemporaries complain that he is making them feel demoralized because they want to hear nice sounding words.  And so, they set out to kill him to silence what they do not want to hear.  There is really not much different today when the Church, or when you and I, try to stand for some truth of the faith or some truth of the moral order.  One lesson of today’s passage is that we cannot dismiss God’s sovereignty or His judgment in our lives, in the lives of others, and His judgment of the world.  That reality means we must face our own need for conversion and to shake ourselves out of the slumber of preferring other relationships to the one God generously establishes with us.

In no way dismissing the lesson of God’s primacy and judgment, I want to suggest also another lesson from the images of water and fire.  This lesson is not the strange and cryptic sounding message of judgment and of destruction.  I think another application can be made to our mission and responsibility as disciples.  The Scriptures show that the Lord’s suffering and death for us are called his baptism.  Rather than water, he is immersed and plunged into the guilt of our sin.  He does this on our behalf and out of divine love for us.  Having endured his baptism, his Cross, the Lord, like Jeremiah, is drawn out from the mud, the mire of our sins and our tendency to want to soften the demands of discipleship.  Having suffered and died for us, he is drawn out from the place of death in his resurrection.  And from his resurrected body in heaven the Lord sends forth the Holy Spirit who comes in tongues of fire at Pentecost.  What if these odd sounding words from Jesus in today’s Gospel can also be heard as a reference to that sending of the Holy Spirit?  In other words, Jesus endures his baptism and comes to set the earth on fire.  For us looking back in history on those words we can say that he has already done so by sending the Holy Spirit.  And you and I are recipients of that purifying and enveloping fire.  What if we hear those cryptic sounding words – “I have come to set the earth of fire” – as an indication of our mission?  Through his Church we each have received baptism and later confirmation.  We are called to understand the primacy of our relationship with God and the share we have in enveloping the world with the truth of the Gospel.  How will the world be set aflame if not through us and our zeal, dedication, and excitement to live the faith and to share with others what that means?  Jesus’ use of fire imagery is not all that unfamiliar to us.  While I certainly mean to avoid inappropriate and negative meanings, there are popular idioms today by which we speak of “lighting something up” or “being lit”.  When someone is worked up in a good way or excited, we say they are “on fire.”  And we have the convenient fire emoji to go along with sharing that description in text messages.

Yes, the work of being part of the Lord’s setting the earth on fire is part of our mission.  If we ourselves are on fire we can’t help but light up others.  That work will be challenging, certainly.  Our age, as every age, does not want to hear moral or religious demands.  Our age does not want to hear words that shake things up and expose the lack of substance in just “getting along”.  We may face opposition like Jeremiah.  But judgment will come to us if we do not pass on the fire.  And when we find ourselves overwhelmed, plunged in the mire of opposition, or just plunged in the mire of our weakness and sin, we cry out with the psalmist: Lord, come to my aid!  And we have confidence in the Lord’s response evoking images of Jeremiah: “The Lord heard my cry.  He drew me out of the pit of destruction, out of the mud… [and] he made firm my steps.”