Blazing Fire

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time C-2

Entrance Antiphon Ps 84 (83):10-11 Turn your eyes, O God, our shield; and look on the face of your anointed one; one day within your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.

Collect O God, who have prepared for those who love you good things which no eye can see, fill our hearts, we pray, with the warmth of your love, so that, loving you in all things and above all things, we may attain your promises, which surpass every human desire. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Scripture today: Jeremiah 38:4-6.8-10; Psalm 39; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

Jesus said to his disciples: I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. (Luke 12:49-53)

Blazing Fire In our Gospel today our Lord tells us why he came among us : ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!’ (Luke 12:49-53). He came to set alight a fire and have it blazing. The fire is the fire of God’s love, a love which filled his own heart and which he wishes to see fill the heart of each of us. Our Lord was once asked, Which is the first of all the commandments? He said, This is the first, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ Our Lord came to see that command fulfilled. His mission was to fulfil it in himself, and to see it fulfilled in the hearts of each of us. It was to be a fire blazing on the whole earth. Whenever we think of the fire of that love, in the first instance we should think, not of our love for God, but of God’s love for us manifested in Christ. The first source of all love and its foundation, is God’s love. We live and move and have our being only because God loves us. All that we have in life, we have only because God loves us. We have been redeemed from the terrible consequences of sin, only because God loves us. The revelation of this love is Jesus, and if we wish to come to know the love that God has for us and be filled with love for him in return, we must come to know Jesus. It is the teaching of the Church and the testimony of the entire Christian tradition that Jesus loves each of us with a personal and individual love, just as if each of us were the only object of his love. This great truth has to be discovered personally. Of course, the Christian should know that Jesus loves us, but this knowledge can easily be a mere notion. It has to become personal, realized in a personal sense. If this is to happen, we must, each of us, be working at this realization. This is the purpose of spiritual exercises, such as, for instance, daily meditation on the Gospels and spiritual reading, the devout praying of the Rosary, the daily examination of conscience, and above all a devout reception of the Sacraments.

The purpose of these spiritual exercises is to build up a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. On our part, the foundation of this relationship is our own realization of the love that he, Jesus, has for me, for each and for all. This requires thought, prayer and the Sacraments. It is a great work — as our Lord said once, this is the work of God, to believe in the one he has sent. The whole purpose of life is to know Jesus, to love him, and on that basis to serve him. The fire our Lord sets alight begins with the knowledge and love of Him, which while being our own work is above all the work of God within us. That is to say, while it is true that this fire of love for God will blaze only if we work on gaining a personal realization of God’s love for us, fundamentally this itself depends on what God does in us by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The fire Christ wishes to set blazing on the earth is the fire of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the love of God — the love that the Father has for the Son and which the Son has for the Father. This love of God which is the Spirit of God is the Gift of the Father and the Son to mankind. He, the Holy Spirit, was sent at Pentecost to the infant Church gathered around Mary, and who appeared on each in the form of tongues of fire. It is He, the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus wishes to cast on the earth. So let us pray to the Holy Spirit to help us come to know the love that God has for us, that love which is revealed in the person and the work of Jesus his Son. Let us resolve to work every day at coming to know and love Jesus, but understanding well that this can only happen with the help and grace of the Holy Spirit who is himself the love of the Father and the Son. Personal holiness does indeed require our own daily work, but far more so is it the result of the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Let us ask that the Holy Spirit will come. Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love!

Let us make our own a prayer to the Holy Spirit written by St Augustine: “Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, That my thoughts may all be holy. Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work too, may be holy. Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, that I love only what is holy. Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy. Guard me then, O Holy Spirit, that I always may be holy.”

(E.J.Tyler)

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A Second Reflection on the Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time C-2

Scripture today: Jeremiah 38:4-6.8-10; Psalm 39; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

Jesus said to his disciples: I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. (Luke 12:49-53)

Fire and Suffering Over the Sundays of the liturgical year we gradually proceed through the chapters of a particular Gospel, and the Sunday Gospel for this year is that of St Luke. For the past two weeks we have been following in that gospel the instruction of Jesus in chapters 12. We have read Jesus’ judgment on the values of this world and his account of the Christian life. Today’s gospel speaks of the urgency of our Lord’s mission. “I have come to cast fire on the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled. I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how I am constrained till it is accomplished” (Luke 12:49-53). The “baptism” is his coming suffering and death. The “fire” is the fire of which John the Baptist spoke — the Holy Spirit and the purifying, sanctifying action of his grace. “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire,” John had said, and it is a fire that cannot be enkindled till Christ has suffered. But the full accomplishment of his mission requires that countless others — down through the ages to each of us — be baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire, uniting themselves with him in his passion and death. The touch of Christ’s Cross means that there will be problems. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you but rather division.” Is not Jesus the prince of peace, we can hear it being asked? Did not the angels announce at his birth, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace”? Yes indeed, but when our Lord said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” he immediately added, “Not as the world gives do I give to you.” In closing his last discourse with the words, “I have said this to you that in me you may have peace” he immediately added, “in the world you have tribulation.” That is to say, the peace Jesus gives is for those who truly believe, which immediately sets up a division between those who believe and those who do not. For he says, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you,” and again, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as one of its own; but because you are not of the world, because I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”

In that sense Jesus has indeed brought not peace but division. He has brought a great division between those willing to hear his word and to stake their lives on it, and the rest of the world which thinks all this to be stuff and airy nonsense, dreams and illusions. Every Sunday in the Creed we proclaim that “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” But if we do, then according to many, we are just sick — sick in the head. If a father wants to give to the poor some of the inheritance which the son was expecting; if a daughter-in-law encourages her husband in generous service, rather than along the course his ambitious mother had planned for him — then there will be trouble. Jesus’ own relatives came to get him shortly after he began preaching, wondering if he was going mad. How much more other families? Such fierce opposition to the one who embodies God’s message is what is behind the action in today’s passage from Jeremiah (Jeremiah 38:4-6.8-10). The army of the Chaldeans was threatening Jerusalem, and Jeremiah was consistently preaching to the king and people what God had revealed to him, that they should surrender. Those who did not believe him tried to have him put to death. Such is the typical lot of the prophet at the hands of those who cannot understand nor accept the message from God. In the letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 12:1-4), Jesus is described as the one who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, and we are exhorted to follow his example. Even as Jesus looked forward eagerly to casting his fire and completing his baptism of suffering and death, in that same Letter we are urged to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” Can we endure this ongoing baptism as a true disciple of the master, determined to do God’s will day by day? He, as we read in Hebrews, “for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising its shame”; yet, as the same letter goes on, “you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”

Let us resolve to unite ourselves with Jesus in his sufferings so as to share in his resurrection. But for this we need the fire of his Holy Spirit.

(E.J.Tyler)

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