Mass readings for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Jeremiah 38.4-6, 8-10 Psalm 40.1-3, 17 Hebrews 12.1-4 Luke 12.49-53
Jesus says that he “comes with fire”. That’s not an image we are likely to have of Jesus or one we would like to have: so bellicose—like a rampaging chieftain putting to fire the settlements of his enemies, scorching the earth so as to give his foes no refuge, no place of retreat. This speaks of destruction, and we recoil from that.
G.K. Chesterton wrote in the Everlasting Man, our images of Jesus in our tradition, our icons and statuary tend toward that idea of Jesus as a most merciful and humane lover of humanity. Consider our own statue of the Sacred Heart. And so, Chesterton writes,
“…there is something that makes the blood run cold in the idea of having a statue of Jesus in wrath.”
Yet here we have our Lord dispelling the idea of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” in no uncertain terms.
However, it is not wrath that he is visiting upon us, but justice; and our own consciences surely burn when we consider how unfaithful we have been, how lacking in trust in him we have been. And for the faithful, this renews us in our efforts; but for those who have fallen away, or rejected outright the gospel, the burning fire is that of insult and the injury of their pride. That is why Christ divides, or rather, we divide ourselves before him.
And as much as we might try to couch this divide in terms of us against some great faceless enemy out there, Jesus tells us this is more like a civil war, a domestic conflict. It is between those who are kith and kin, neighbour and friend – not faceless strangers on the other side of the world, or a convenient foreign nation or people we can all stereotype and mark out distinctly as our enemy.
The gospel can set you against your dad; it can put you in opposition to your daughter; it can divide households and make friends part company.
I would say that none of us finds that appealing. The prospect of a break with one’s child, one’s parent, a sibling, is likely appalling for most of us; and for those who’ve experienced a division, it is heartbreaking.
Yet, we must be faithful to the truth and authentic love that Christ teaches us to live by; and then pray that by our good example, those who are now our enemies will come to be God’s friends. And if that essential friendship must come at the sacrifice of our personal friendships, so be it.
Such was the witness of the early church, the martyrs of the Roman arena and the roadside crucifixions.
Jesus very much sounds like a revolutionary, and a man of violence here, yet we must understand that he conceives of the struggle as spiritual; and insofar as he wishes for this firestorm, it is not a destructive fire but a cleansing one; as farmers burn off stubble in their fields, as the furnace tests and purifies the metal.
He is not so much about the enemy; and there is an enemy, but more about what is going to be called for from us all to accomplish the revolution he has started.
We cannot turn away from this Jesus because he makes us uncomfortable, because this isn’t the Jesus we want. We can’t make of him what we will since by our baptism we have asked him to make something better of us.
But it would seem in every generation, there are those who would back away from this firebrand Jesus; and try to create a more palatable image out of selective reading of scripture and tradition that makes Jesus not so much the man who upends the moneychangers’ tables, but rather one who advocates for a thorough audit of their books.
I’ve mentioned in the past an interesting little volume by the eminent orthodox theologian, Jaroslav Pelikan, entitled, Jesus Through The Centuries.
It’s a survey of Christian history that shows in the art and literature of the Christian world how people represented Jesus according to the cultural conventions of their respective times and places. There is something understandable and good in making the person of Jesus easier for people to appreciate, and so we do need sometimes to use the language and imagery of the culture to “translate” Jesus for the latest generation.
However, there is a pitfall in this: the temptation to make him over in our image; or for powerful individuals and groups to cast him in such a way as to associate our Lord with themselves. It is no small coincidence that in the Byzantine Empire, Jesus was cast as an Emperor – what imperial subject didn’t miss the resemblance between Christ, the Emperor of the Universe, and the ruler who sat upon a similar throne in Constantinople?
Yet sometimes drawing out themes from the gospels that speak to a particular culture in a specific historical moment can be very beneficial. When in the early Middle Ages, the idea of Jesus as Warrior (of course of a spiritual kind) became popular among the Frankish people of central and western Europe, the Church saw a way of using this to transform a very violent society of near constant warfare among tribes and nations into one in which the barbarian warrior was made into the Christian knight. The chieftains, who maintained their power by demonstrating their capacity to raid neighbours and bring back treasure and slaves, were converted into kings who showed their worthiness to rule by the justice they dispensed, and the peace they maintained.
Now, you might say they were all still pretty violent brutes, but then that is to fail to appreciate how shifting the warrior thinking toward understanding their vocation as champions of justice and defenders of the weak was a revolution; that kings could not wage war for the sake of pillaging to enrich themselves, but had to make a legal case for the justice of their cause or be disgraced; well, that allowed a civilization to be built. No, it didn’t stop war entirely, but it really reduced it.
In this we have an instance of Christ using the culture as a medium of grace to affect his revolution; in the former we have the powerful using Jesus for their own purposes, not Christ’s.
We then must be careful of the temptation to use Jesus as a front man for our ambitions, as worthy as we believe our causes to be. We must in humility offer up the gospel, tell the stories of Jesus and invite others into communion, not on the basis of their opinions on the issues of the day, but rather according to their spiritual hunger for truth and love according to the Holy Spirit.
When we fail to resist this; the results are disastrous. We can see how many mainline protestant churches are in freefall as a result of forgetting the spiritual task set before them. They seek to be “relevant” to the culture rather than serve as a means by which the refugees of our sad and degenerate culture can find find their way to the authenticity, and mystery of God in Christ.
In my extracurricular reading and viewing this past week I came across the latest skirmish in our current cultural war: Amazon is producing the most expensive television program in history, and it is a prequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Now, you may have little interest in hobbits and elves; and I confess my interest is slight even as a person who read and reread those books as a boy, a teen and a young adult, but the outrage over what appears to have been produced is illustrative of what I’m talking about.
What fans of Tolkien accuse Amazon of doing is similar to what I’ve just been discussing: they appear to have taken the forms and fashions of the world that Tolkien created, but not respected the substance of what he wrote. They want to tell their story, a different story but keep the trappings of a beloved tale.
The charge is that they’ve transformed a fantasy world into which readers have escaped for generations, into a rather familiar landscape in which the strangeness of Middle Earth is emptied out and replaced with the mundanity of our world so that important current issues can be explored, where the audience can identify with characters as they look and act like us in all our diversity, inclusivity and toleration.
The producers of the show seem to have failed to understand what the very catholic gentleman professor who wrote the Lord of Rings was about in creating this world of dwarves and dragons.
The story is not compelling because it reminds us of this world, but rather by putting us in the midst of this strange universe of wizards and orcs, our point of contact with the characters and their struggles is in the virtues they champion and the trials they endure so as to remain faithful to them. Hobbits aren’t heroes to only readers of short stature; and elves are admired by readers who may not share their skin colour – the characters are loved because of their virtues; and how their adventures prompt Tolkien’s fans to live better lives in this world.
I am not a Semitic person as Jesus was; and the ancient world he walked through, teaching and healing, is long gone. My lineage is of rather common farmer folk from the British Isles and northwestern France; I live in an age of bewildering technology; I have air conditioning in my home, and refrigerator in my kitchen; and yet I can read the story of Jeremiah and marvel at his fortitude in the face of people prepared to do him violence so as to keep him from proclaiming God’s word. I can read the words of St. Paul, a tentmaker by trade, a man trained in the tradition of the pharisees, a long-gone sect of ancient Judaism, and yet his words of reassurance fill me with confidence in my Lord.
We are to offer, as best we can, Jesus in all his complexity and trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us all into the fullness of truth. Jesus is not a tool for me to use for my own ends; rather you and I are instruments in his hands, the means by which he accomplishes his work.
Amen.