TWENTIETH SUNDAY HOMILY OF ORDINARY TIME YEAR C
IN ORDINARY ‘TIME
Jer 38:4-6, 8-10 Heb 12:14 Lk 12:49-53
The Christian Life Is Not a Spectator Sport
Life Is a Race; Keep Your Eyes on Jesus; The Personality of Jesus; Commitment; Jesus’ Strength; Doing What You Have to Do; Telling the Real from the Fake.
1st Reading – Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10
4 In those days, the princes said to the king: “Jeremiah ought to be put to death; he is demoralizing the soldiers who are left in this city, and all the people, by speaking such things to them; he is not interested in the welfare of our people, but in their ruin.”
5 King Zedekiah answered: “He is in your power”; for the king could do nothing with them.
6 And so they took Jeremiah and threw him into the cistern of Prince Malchiah, which was in the quarters of the guard, letting him down with ropes. There was no water in the cistern, only mud, and Jeremiah sank into the mud.
8 Ebed-melech, a court official, went there from the palace and said to him:
9 “My lord king, these men have been at fault in all they have done to the prophet Jeremiah, casting him into the cistern. He will die of famine on the spot, for there is no more food in the city.”
10 Then the king ordered Ebed-melech the Cushite to take three men along with him, and draw the prophet Jeremiah out of the cistern before he should die.
Responsorial Psalm – Psalms 40:2, 3, 4, 18
R. (14b) Lord, come to my aid!
2 I have waited, waited for the LORD,
and he stooped toward me.
R. Lord, come to my aid!
3 The LORD heard my cry.
He drew me out of the pit of destruction,
out of the mud of the swamp;
he set my feet upon a crag;
he made firm my steps.
R. Lord, come to my aid!
4 And he put a new song into my mouth,
a hymn to our God.
Many shall look on in awe
and trust in the LORD.
R. Lord, come to my aid!
18 Though I am afflicted and poor,
yet the LORD thinks of me.
You are my help and my deliverer;
O my God, hold not back!
R. Lord, come to my aid!
2nd Reading – Hebrews 12:1-4
Brothers and sisters:
1 Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us.
2 while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God.
3 Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart.
4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.
Alleluia – John 10:27
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
27 My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord;
I know them, and they follow me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel – Luke 12:49-53
Jesus said to his disciples:
49 “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!
50 There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!
51 Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.
52 From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three;
53 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.”
Homily
Each of us has two aspects about us that are important — personhood and personality. Personhood embraces our reasoning powers, which enable us to transcend immediate needs and understand what life is all about, and our will, which enables us to love. Personhood is where good and evil reside. Personality, on the other hand, consists of those surface characteristics which appear to other people and attract or repel them. A nice way of laughing, a good way of talking, and gracious manners attract, while their opposites repel. A bad person can have an attractive personality, and a good person can have a repelling personality. We like to believe that it is one’s personhood that matters, but when all is said and done it is often personality that wins out.
With Jesus, it is helpful to know not only that his personhood consisted of the two natures of God and of man, but what his personality was like. Those who overemphasize the gentleness of Jesus’ personality traits are scandalized by a Gospel passage like today’s, which emphasizes Jesus’ strength. Many pictures and statues of Jesus overemphasize Jesus’ humility, gentleness, and kindness, depicting him as almost a long—haired sissy.
Today, Jesus speaks with a mixture of anguish and fear about having to light a fire on the earth and undergo a baptism. Both fire and water are ambivalent symbols. Fire from the earliest history of human —kind has fascinated people. It is both awesome and wondrous on the one hand, and terrifying on the other. Fire is so wondrous that early civilization created the story of an ancestor, Prometheus, stealing it from the gods. It was around the fire that the household gathered, that humankind perfected speech, made up songs, and explored the mysteries of life. It was around the fire that our ancestors sacrificed to their gods, and smoke that carried prayers heavenward linked religion and domesticity.
Although many of those benefits have been broken by stoves and furnaces that provide nothing to gaze into for that reverie and companionship which is important to every human being, we still approach fire with near religious devotion. To some primitives, the fact that fire always bums upward and never in any other direction symbolizes the direction of God. To the early Hebrews, in fact, fire symbolized both the presence and the activity of God. (“The Lord, your God, is a consuming fire” [Dt 4:241.) When the Jews were going from Egypt to the Holy Land, they were preceded at night by a pillar of fire, the symbol of God leading them.
Fire has also been terrifying. When God came to Moses with the ten commandments on Mt. Sinai, the mountain was surrounded by fire. When on another occasion Moses conversed with God, God was symbolized by a burning bush; God used fire on Sodom and Gomorrah to show His judgment. The Jews were instructed to consume their offerings to God in fire, to show sacrifice. And many passages in the Jewish Scriptures show the use of fire to symbolize testing, dividing, purifying, and judging. In our time, burning buildings and blazing forests also witness to the terrifying nature of fire.
The encounter with the living God refines, purifies, and transforms those who are open to conversion, but destroy those who persist in asserting the self as independent of God and God’s reign. The symbolism suggests an interpretation that hell can be, whatever else it is, painful self-damnation and self-destruction in such many-faceted ways as a human life offers.
Jesus also said that he had a baptism to receive. This brings to mind another ambivalent symbol of God’s activity — water. This scorched planet, after it cooled enough to have a crust, seemed impossible for life. The atmosphere was poisonous — chiefly methane, ammonia fumes, and hydrogen sulfide. (If there had been any human beings about, the stench would have been awful!) Two of its most common elements were hydrogen and oxygen. Together, then and now they create the only liquid that forms naturally on the earth’s surface — a supple, sparkling substance which rises and falls in ocean tides, spirals and crashes in surf, forms fluffy clouds, and reflects the splendour of sunsets.
For about one and a half billion years, water performed its wonders on a rocky, dead, volcano-tortured globe. In time, steam erupted from volcanoes, formed dark clouds, then fell as rain in century-long cloudbursts that drenched the rocks. Many elements were dissolved out of the rocks and poured into the great mixing bowl of the seas — iron, calcium, sodium, phosphorus, potassium. Finally tiny living cells appeared with those elements in them, sensitive to their surroundings, endowed with energy systems dependent upon water and its nutrients for their existence.
When animals emigrated from the sea, elaborate arrangements like threads of blood streams had to be made to keep every cell in their bodies in a watery environment. Human beings, when God created them, were 70 per cent water, and this level must still be constantly maintained. You can die of dehydration in six days. In addition to providing nutrition, water purifies. Like fire, it separates and renders judgment, as with the exodus from Egypt when the waters saved the Jews and killed the Egyptians.
In today’s Gospel, fire and water mean that Jesus was going to have to be purified by being submerged in his suffering and death. Hence his mixed feelings in looking ahead to it. Nevertheless he would do what he had to do. His “fire on the earth”, with its lack of exterior peace, was originally meant for Jewish Christians ostracized by their families, and Gentile Christians cut off from the mainstream of Greco—Roman culture; it also applies to all who must go against received opinions and disturb the status quo.
So today’s Gospel puts a hard face on Jesus’ personality. He was realist enough to know that his message would bring a sword, even to people who were closely related to each other.
But we must take the message of the Bible as a whole, and not just one passage here or there. As he says elsewhere, Jesus really came to bring peace. The peace he came to bring isn’t peace as some people may define it, but the peace of God. The difference is that human peace is basically extrinsic, a matter of temporary trade-offs and compromises, but the peace of God is basically a matter of truth, integrity, and love that always provides inner harmony. God’s peace is that loving communion with Him, with one’s neighbour, and with oneself which comes from living the ‘beatitudes. It is the kind of peace that Maximilian Kolbe had when in the Nazi concentration camp he gave his life to save another inmate and was starved to death; the kind of peace that the J Japanese martyrs in Nagasaki had when they sang hymns of praise to God as they were being crucified; the kind of peace that the Ugandan martyrs had when they were being burned alive.
Jesus had God’s peace as be fulfilled his mission. So did Jeremiah in today’s First Reading. Jeremiah’s ministry took place in those fateful twelve years between the first fall of Jerusalem and its final destruction in 587 BC. As the armies of Babylon were preparing for an assault on Jerusalem, Jeremiah spoke the truth as he heard it from God about the inner rot of his nation. He told the weak King Zedekiah and his people that,-unless they repented and returned to God, they would be destroyed. The leaders said that Jeremiah’s message was demoralizing the people, and accused him of treason.
Jeremiah’s punishment was to be put in a cistern to die of exposure, hunger, and thirst. Every town had such cisterns, its walls built out of rock and plastered with limestone to collect and hold precious and scarce rainwater. The cistern’s opening was narrow, to prevent the loss of water by evaporation. By the time of Jeremiah’s punishment, which was at the end of the dry summer season, most of the water had been drawn, leaving the bottom mud in which Jeremiah was trapped.
Even at the orders of the inept king, no Judean would soil his hands on Jeremiah, and he had to be rescued by a foreigner, the Ethiopian Ebed-melech. Faith-filled and patriotic, Jeremiah really loved the city and its holy Temple. More, he loved his people. Despite his pain, Jeremiah, like Jesus in the future, did what he had to do. And in that awful summer his words were fulfilled. Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. By an irony, just before that Jeremiah was kidnapped and taken to Egypt with refugees; there he died in exile.
What do we do in response to today’s disregard of God’s messages? The letter to the Hebrews has the perfect answer. First, remember that life for us Christians is a participatory race, not a spectator sport. Secondly, we must keep our eyes on Jesus, who is our goal, our model, and our companion.
The Christian life means we must be willing to pay the price for being in the race, just as athletes do by their training to win. But just as some athletes are handicapped, we are handicapped by the encumbrances of sin. Our sins may result from the habits we have formed, the companions we have made, the weaknesses we have tolerated, the passions we carry with us, the personality we’ve developed. But we are also surrounded by what the letter to the Hebrews wonderfully calls a “cloud of witnesses”. These are the countless people who have gone before us in the faith and won their race of life — at that time the heroic First Testament figures, in our time adding the heroes and saints who have lived ever since. They knew all the struggles of running and the joy of winning. In running our life’s race, it helps to picture this cloud of witnesses cheering us on. Through it all, we must imitate the personality of Jesus in both his gentleness and his strength.