NewCreation

Homily for 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And this week our Gospel continues straight on from where we left it last time. Today's Gospel is very short and it seems to be something absolutely central to what Jesus is about. And it helps to refer, I think, both backwards and forwards in this chapter to the difficulty in understanding the signs of what's going on, of what's going to happen. You remember in last week's Gospel one of the things which Jesus explained was that the Master would come at an hour, and well done the servants who were up to receive him, and then use the image of the thief in the night, suggesting that the same coming is going to be perceived in two different ways by different people, and learning to interpret that is going to be tremendously important. So here we have these very, very rich, complex statements, which I'm going to read as the Church reads, in the light of our wonderful reading from Hebrews, which contains the great phrase — or the great sentence — "for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, he regarded as nothing the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God." It's the notion of the joy that was set before him that's how we're asked to interpret the fire coming to the earth. And I want to say yes, but there's rather more to it than that. "So I came to bring fire to the earth, and I wish it were already kindled." It's one of the very few places in the Gospel where Jesus gives personal vent to a feeling, to something that's really on his heart in a way that's revealing rather than a teaching. This is something that is an expression of who he is. "I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed." So: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already put to the earth." It's putting fire to something. Now, there are many, many forms of fire related to God in the Hebrew Scriptures, and guess what? Most of them are something to do with wrath. They're not a friendly thing. But there is also the fire that is the fire of the cult, showing the liveness of God in the Temple. And I suspect that it's this fire that is being referred to. It's the fire that is the apparent wrath of God, which was also the purifying, cleansing fire which is going to actually be given to people. And you remember that in the Acts of the Apostles, one of the things about the giving of the Spirit is the giving of the fire, so that the fire comes and rests upon — is divided out and rests upon — the head of each person in the house. So the fire that was the Temple, the real thing, has come about. And now this is going to have a huge and catastrophic effect, or potentially catastrophic effect, on humanity. So Jesus is saying something about what he actually expects to be producing. He expects to be producing something catastrophic at the human level. It's really going to shake us up. And I want to say: and so it has. "I have a baptism with which to be baptized." And it's interesting that the verbs here link together both Jesus's baptism by John and his crucifixion, so that what Jesus is saying is it's the whole of that that is the baptism he's waiting for to be completed, which is when he breathes out the Spirit, after which the fire is brought to the earth. He will actually enable that fire, the fire of God, to come to the earth. But he's also aware that this is going to be a dangerous thing, a thoroughly disconcerting thing. "Do you think that I've come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division" — dividing out. It's the same verb, it's certainly the verb for the dividing out of the portions of fire in Acts. And what does this division, this dividing out, look like? "Well, from now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three." Now, I hope you notice that that's not the only sort of division you could have amongst five people. The sort of division that would have been previous, and which people have relied on for centuries, is the four against one and one against four division. But what Jesus is doing by his baptism quite literally is removing the possibility of unity over against a wicked one who is then driven out. In other words, the old way of keeping peace is going. He's taking it away. And this is going to be a deeply disturbing thing. All attempts to keep unity are going to come down ever, ever closer to being 50-50, to being undecidable. All squabbles are going to be undecidable. And there will be people who will long to go back to the one-against-all model, or the all-against-one model, because it seems that at least they get peace that way. But of course, it's the peace of death, the peace of totalitarian destruction of another. It's a completely fake peace. So this kind of peace, this kind of permanent inability to resolve because things are too close, the 52-48 world, which is very much the world in which we live, where every time you think that there's going to start to be a clear majority for something, it manages to get turned back to something incredibly close and impossible to resolve. That's the world he realizes that he's leaving us with. And guess what? That means that we are always going to have to be working out which side we're on at any time. If everything is 3-2-2-3, then working out which side you're going to be on is going to be the most difficult thing, because it will make all the difference. And all of us are constantly in that. This is the kind of division that is produced. I think, incidentally, that in the world in which I live this is completely evident. It's completely evident that this prophecy has come true once you remove the scapegoat element, once you remove the possibility to believe that you are really right by making unity over against a wicked other. You make unity impossible, you make cheap unity impossible, and you make tough unity a constant negotiation. And of course that is the world in which the Holy Spirit comes alive, being in between us, constantly trying to create unity without lapsing back into the all-against-one. And we see, alas, in our political world, constant attempts to go back to the all-against-one. The easiest form of contrarianism, if you like, is being contrary to the incredibly difficult business of consensus building. The really positive sort of contrarianism is being aware that consensus building is by nature always failing, and that therefore what it looks like to build real unity is always going to work out how not to be run by the apparent awfulness of the other who's pushing you around. That's the real contrarianism, and it requires an extraordinary delicacy of spirit. And this is what Jesus has brought amongst us. He says, "They will be divided." He's talking about the households again. "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." Well, here he's quoting the prophet Micah. Now the prophet Micah has a slightly different take on this same thing. Here he is talking about what's going to happen when the Lord comes. He says, "For the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. Your enemies are members of your own household." Now, I hope you notice that there's a subtle difference between what the prophet Micah is denouncing and what Jesus is saying. The prophet Micah is talking about sons being contemptuous against fathers. But Jesus is completely even-handed. The kind of division that he's producing, the collapse of fake unity, is going to set fathers against sons, sons against fathers. It's not a question of the right is on the side of the fathers as opposed to the sons, nor of the mothers against the daughters. This is no backup to patriarchy. It's the recognition that literally every form of cultural unity is going to be stressed and broken by what he's doing — every form of cultural unity — which means that we're going to have to work at whatever unity we're going to create. If we're going to be together, we're going to have to work out how to be together, which is vastly more difficult than depending on a previous cultural unity which will then teach us how to be over against certain people, will make fathers automatically right against their sons, or in other versions sons automatically right against their fathers. There is this sense that every form of cultural unity is going to be shaken by what he's doing. And incidentally, the notion of Micah — the prophet Micah — it's not the only reference we get to the prophet Micah. That incident was Micah 7 verses 6 to 7, verse 6, that you've read before. But earlier he said: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled. I have a baptism with which I will be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed." Now the interesting thing is that "the stress" makes it sound as though it's, you know, sort of a personal anxiety thing, but this word — "the stress" — appears in the Hebrew Scriptures talking about constraining. It's God constraining wrath, holding it back. The first reference we get to it is when God looks on Noah and decides finally to have mercy on people after having, in his wrath, wiped out the whole of violent humanity. He constrains the heavens, he holds it back. So the notion here is: "I'm coming from on high, how I wish it were all kindled, how tough it is to constrain what I want to give, until it is completed." And what he wants to give is going to look to some awfully like wrath, but in fact it's the possibility of living without wrath, in the midst of a world that is going to become visibly or apparently more wrathful. But we're going to know where the source of peace and unity — real peace and real unity — is. And the challenge for us — and that's going to be the challenge we see in the next couple of passages in Luke — is going to be: how do we interpret, how do we interpret which side to be on? How do we interpret where the path to looking for real unity and real togetherness is, respecting all the differences between fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law? All those real differences that are shown up by collapses in Culture collapses in generation, impossibility to keep fake unity together. So that, I think, is this week's challenge: to remember that the gift of the Holy Spirit is the most destabilizing entrance of the Spirit of the Creator into our midst. It leads to a constant world of re-signifying, of making all things new, of working out how, in whatever space of disaster or catastrophe we are as fake unity collapses, we can begin to usher in the new world. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.