The 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 14, 2022

Luke 12, 49–53

Jesus said to his disciples: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”

The Israelite Prophets tended not to move around very much unless, like Elijah, they were in danger from a king.  The Pharisees did not move around very much either.  They worked at their trades and had families to support and so unless their business took them abroad, they stayed in their village or town.  John the Baptist seems to have moved around very little during the time he preached and baptized.  The Lord Jesus, by contrast, was always on the move and seldom remained in one place for very long.  For three years he walked hurriedly from town to town, preaching and healing the sick.  “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!”  He himself was that fire that blazed across Israel.  In his blazing he consumed fuel and grew larger by it.  His increase was his Apostles and devoted followers.  Christ, as a blazing fire, has touched almost all the parts of the world.  Some parts that appeared as fuel proved impervious to his flame, refusing to ignite by it.  In other places, his fire burned out because a fire must have fuel to live.  Thus, people are free to reject the Lord and his reaching even if they received them joyously at first.  Such is the case in great swaths of the Western world.

A characteristic of the Lord which we should not fail to note as we read the Gospels is his keen zeal, his relentless drive.  Obeying his Father’s will, he did not spare himself or his Apostles in his efforts to see every person in the land, and even some outside of it.  He said to a man who wanted to follow him, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8, 20).  Now, the man had promised to follow him wherever he went, but the Lord assured him that he would indeed have to go far, and he would also have to do with makeshift living.  Jesus said he had nowhere “to lay his head”, but he could have had his pick of the best quarters in any town if he had not insisted on moving at a torrid pace.  He slept out of doors under the stars or in the niches in the stony hills of Judea en route to his next destination.  He seems to have taken most of his meals on the go, stopping for food only when a feast was made for him and he meant to work at it, preaching to people in their private homes who would not have listened to him otherwise.  Thus, he eats at the houses of Pharisees on certain occasions and also with tax collectors and the like.  

His goal was to offer himself as the Sacrifice that would save us from our sins, that would reconcile the human race with God, that would open the gates of heaven to us: “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!”  We should think “washing” here rather than the Sacrament of Baptism.  He was washed with his own Blood so that he could wash us in it and make us members of his Body.  His ”anguish” to sacrifice himself for us explains why he says to Peter, on the first occasion of his foretelling his coming Passion and Death, “Get behind me, Satan!”  The Lord sees the devil using Peter to try and delay or prevent his dying on the Cross.  This dying for us was the reason he had come down from heaven.  The purpose of his preaching was to explain that he, as the incarnate Son of God, was doing this for us and how we should live so as to reap the reward he was winning for us.  The purpose of the miracles was to verify that he was approved by the Father to do this.

“Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”  The Greek word here translated as “division” is actually a verb meaning “to break up”.  Thus, “A father shall be broken from his son.”  This is no neat, smooth division, but a shattering.  The shattering would first occur within a person’s heart as that person experienced the gushing of the Lord’s love for him and then as that person looked upon his own dreadful unworthiness due to his sins.  The new convert wholly rejects past ways of life and all that went with them in order to do everything possible out of love for Jesus.  This shattering, then, shatters relationships which hinder a person from fully living the life Jesus means for him.  That which is not transformed by the grace of the Lord must go, including parents, servants, and property (cf. Mark 1, 20).

A person deeply in love lets nothing stand in the way between him and the one he adores.