20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 18, 2019 : Setting the earth on Fire

The first words Jesus blurts out in today’s Gospel are: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing.”  Wow!  I don’t often think of Jesus as a drama person, he’s normally much more subtle, talking, touching and healing people one by one and usually out of sight from the crowds.  But, if you noticed, Jesus is saying this only to the disciples, I presume in a quiet setting.  So, just what is this fire that Jesus wants to set?

This little scene in the life of Jesus displays so boldly the fire in his soul.  But he says: “I want to set the earth of fire.”  When we think of setting the earth on fire, at least when I think of setting the earth on fire, the first image that came to my mind was the horrific fires we had just one year ago that burned Paradise California to the ground; destroyed homes and businesses all over California.  Is this the kind of fire Jesus wants to set?  A destructive fire that makes people homeless, divides families; this is hinted at   at the end of the Gospel today?  Does Jesus want to divide and conquer, setting people against one another?  This is literally what the Gospel tells us: “I have come, not for peace but division.”

Well, a literal interpretation of the text would lead us to this conclusion; but it just doesn’t make any sense.  In the last part of the Gospel Luke is simply relating what he observed: that individuals and families were dividing between those Jews who didn’t believe and the ones who did believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah.  I have experienced this myself when bringing some people into the Church.  Families, or parents, who were dead set against their son or daughter becoming a Catholic.  They felt it was a repudiation of all they had taught them, a slap in the face for the way they brought them up, because of the other’s passion to follow what they believed to be their calling.  So, this Gospel story not only happened 2,000 years ago — it's happening right now.

I’ve seen this Gospel played out in my office when I was at West Virginia University, when students would come to me saying their parents wanted them to be doctors, or lawyers, and all they wanted to do was to act, dance, or play in a symphony.  I’ve seen dreams and passions die right before my very eyes because their parents just could not accept it, cutting them off financially and sometime physically because of their dreams.

I think this is what Jesus is getting at, and even what St. Luke is getting at in writing this story.  Don’t kill the dream.  Don’t kill the passion in others or even in ourselves.  I suspect that many of us here today have experienced such deaths, in others and in ourselves.

Jesus says, “I have come so that you may have life and have it to the full.” Jesus comes into our life so we might live passionately.  He wants us to live, and to live our faith in him passionately.  Jesus is bringing a peace than can only be experienced by living passionately.  We need to live passionately for others.

Immigrants at our borders need us to live passionately for them.  Kids in schools, shoppers at Walmart, party-goers at nightclubs need us to live passionately for them by enacting common sense gun laws.  There was an article in the Washington Post this week about the success in selling bulletproof backpacks for kids.  What have we become?  We are not living the Gospel as passionately as we need to.

We, hopefully, passionately pray here, so that we can passionately live — out there.