I HAVE COME TO SET THE EARTH ON FIRE

Luke 12:49-53

The gospel message of this Sunday sounds like a strange paradox. In one part of the Scriptures, Christ promises peace: "I leave you peace, My peace I give to you." And in the gospel of this Sunday, He says, "I have come to bring not peace but division." Is that not a contradiction? Coming from Jesus, these words are quite disturbing. One can’t help but say “Hello? Jesus, is that you speaking?” Yes, it is Jesus who is speaking. It is Jesus who is disturbing our peace and leads us toward true and lasting peace.

This new millennium has witnessed and continues to witness much violence. Hardly any day passes that we do not hear the sad news of violent aggression and brutality perpetrated against innocent people somewhere around the world. To make matters worse, perpetrators of these acts of violence often try to justify these atrocities by claiming that they are fighting for a just cause. Think of all these countries torn apart by war. Today’s readings are indeed a call to war and division: not a war against other people but a war against sin and corruption; a war against the evil one, the devil. If you find Jesus’ words “disturbing,” you’re probably right, because that’s precisely what He wants to do; to disturb us out of our comfort zones, and out of our lethargy.

In this passage, Jesus is speaking not about the purpose of his coming but about the inevitable consequence of his coming. Jesus came to reveal the true sons and daughters of God who listen to God’s word, and the children of this world who oppose God’s design. This divides all humankind into two camps, the camp of the godly and the camp of the ungodly. There is perpetual conflict, a state of war, between these two groups as one group strives to raise the world up to God and the other strives to pull it down to hell. These two groups do not live in two different parts of the world, they live side by side in the same neighborhood, they live together under the same roof, and in fact the forces of good and evil often exist together in the same person.

The holy war to which Christ calls us, therefore, is not a war against people of certain nationalities or cultures, religions or ideologies, but a war in which we first have to identify the forces of evil in our own persons and in the persons of those who are dear to us: father, son, mother, daughter, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law and then declare an uncompromising war against these forces. What the Lord stresses in this Sunday’s gospel is that God’s peace should not be the kind that accepts compromises with evil, or tolerates injustices and supports wrongdoings. And a Christian must exemplify this "peace" even at the cost of antagonizing and hurting relatives or friends; being able to say: My father, my mother, my sister, my brother this is wrong! Sometimes our Christian principles and convictions are weakened when some juicy considerations are offered. The Lord is saying that we should not make compromises or yield in to illegal deals even if some monetary consideration is dangled before us.

If we are at war then we should be prepared for some roughness. The enemy is also fighting against us and we may have to suffer some harm or hardship. Jeremiah in the first reading was fighting a holy war against the false prophets who prophesied only what the king and his officials wanted to hear. But Jeremiah stuck to the truth. And where did he end up; in a well of mud. But God sent a foreigner, an Ethiopian to come and save him. God never abandons His people. Jesus, our leader in God’s holy war did not escape the suffering and death on the cross. But on the third day God raised him to life victorious. God never abandons his people. He will not abandon us if we fight His holy war; the war against evil in ourselves and in the world.

With this thought that God never abandons his own, the author of Hebrews encourages us in the second reading to not grow weary or lose heart. We shall close with his words of advice: Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. The important question each one of us should ask himself is: What are these evil forces that I am asked to war against in my own life, in the life of my family, and in the life of my friends?
Story: A rich woman came to see the priest with mass intention to pray for her dog which died.