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.” (Luke 12.49-53)
Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1181, the young boy was nicknamed Francesco by his father, a wealthy silk merchant in Italy. Pampered by his parents, his early youth was marked by fine clothes, lavish spending, and love of pleasures. However, as he neared adulthood, he found less satisfaction in his fancy clothes and free-spirited lifestyle.
Meeting a beggar in the marketplace one day, Francesco gave the man everything he had in his purse, bringing mockery from his friends and a reprimand from his father. He began to spend more time in lonely places and sold some of his father’s cloth wares to help the poor, bringing down more wrath upon his head. His father brought legal proceedings against him to regain the money. It was during those proceedings that Francesco renounced his father and his inheritance, stripping himself naked as a sign of his renunciation, the bishop in charge soon covering him with his own cloak.
Thereafter, Francesco wandered as a beggar in the Italian hillside and devoted himself to a life of poverty. He wore a coarse woolen tunic as did the other peasants of the region, and went about urging the people of the countryside to change their ways, aspiring to the love and peace that Jesus had exhorted his followers to have.
Wherever he went, Francesco wanted to imitate Christ and his ways. He told the people who gathered around him, “Your God is of your flesh. He lives in your nearest neighbor, in every man.” Francesco’s deep bond of brotherhood with others was evident and he said that he could not consider himself a friend of Christ if he did not cherish all those for whom Christ had died.
In 1226 at the age of forty-four, Franceso died as he had lived, a poor man living among the poor, his last days spent in a humble hut. As he was dying, he sang the words of Psalm 141, “Lord, I call to you, hasten to me.” For almost six-hundred years, his burial place was unknown, hidden to protect it from invading armies. Two years after his death, he was declared a saint by Pope Gregory IX, who had befriended Francesco earlier in his life. Today he is known to us as Saint Francis of Assisi.
If we want to understand the lesson that the Gospel seeks to impart to us today, a selection found at the end of Chapter 12 in Luke’s gospel, then there is no better place to begin than with the story of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, a man who experienced firsthand the words that we hear Jesus say to his followers, promising them that his way will lead to a division even within a household, a father divided against his son and a son against his father.
At first glance, Jesus’ words are shocking, stopping us in our footsteps. We have traveled with Jesus a long way by this point in the gospel and we have seen him as a man of prayer, someone who showed a special empathy for the poor and the abandoned in the world, a person who reached out to the forgotten and the forlorn, not a selfish bone spotted in his body.
And yet, all of sudden, he seems to switch gears, now saying that he “has come to set the earth on fire,” followed by his question, “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?” Without waiting for a response from his stunned disciples, he provides his own answer, “No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three.”
Like them, we feel we have experienced some whiplash, all of a sudden this man of peace saying he wants to set a fire to the world. “Why this change?” we ask ourselves. Why does this man of God who has embraced all others who crossed his path now tell his followers to prepare themselves for an adversarial relationship with others, even with those living under the same roof with them?
That is the crucial question for us to find an answer to today as we examine more closely this passage from Luke’s gospel. We want to know why someone who is called the Prince of Peace should promise divisiveness, the very opposite of a peace-loving, placid personality who exhibited tolerance, hospitality, and graciousness in his everyday life.
Fortunately, the answer is not difficult to find. The overall message that the teacher known as Rabbi Jesus offers to his followers by his words and his works is in opposition to the message that the world at large teaches, a natural and inevitable conflict resulting when the two are put side-by-side, lines drawn in the sand by two opposing understandings of the world.
Rabbi Jesus looked at the world through the lens of the Kingdom of God, viewing the world as a place created by the Most High God and ruled by the ways of his heart. As such, it is a world where everyone shares a common kinship as children of God and who cohabit the world as brothers and sisters, loving one another, sharing goods with each other, and looking out for the least and the last.
However, as the humble carpenter of Nazareth was quick to see, many did not share his world view, choosing instead to create a world of their own making where the rich hoard their goods, where the powerful inflict pain on the powerless, and where humankind is divided into us and them on the basis of the flimsiest of reasons.
Face to face with this view of how things should be done, Rabbi Jesus saw that his proposition, built on the foundation of how God intended the world to be, was at odds with how men had shaped the world, their selfishness and self-interests molding the world into an ugly place that bore little to no resemblance to the paradise that God had created in the beginning.
It is for this same reason that he says, “I have come to set the earth on fire and how I wish it were already blazing!” If the world was ever to conform again to the ways of the Most High God, then it would need a cleansing fire, the misdeeds and misappropriation by evil men put on a trash heap and the rubble burned to the ground so that a new world could rise from the ashes, a world returned to the design intended by God at the start.
Of course, anyone who calls for such a radical change is going to face fierce opposition, those who sit on thrones of power unrepentant and unwilling to give up their seats of honor, tightening their control over the powerless more and more each day as threats of toppling their thrones reach their ears. Those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo–such as the rich, the comfortable, and the well-fed–do not welcome any assault on their systems of control or on the stone walls that they have erected between themselves and the poor, the deprived, and the desperate.
The net result is open warfare between those who envision a new and better world and those who want the world to remain unchanged, a world where the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, where the powerful lord it over the powerless, and where the widow, the orphan and the foreigner are abused and disabused of their birthright as children of God, made to believe themselves lesser than and different from those who sit upon the seats of power.
Jesus stood in opposition to such a static and self-centered world view and so took to task any system that diminished or disallowed the human dignity owed to every person. He directed his ire especially to the religious leaders of his day who should have known better, presenting themselves as holier-than-thous all the while their hearts were filled with rapaciousness and disrespect towards others.
He rightly called them hypocrites, pinpointing their duplicity and chastising them for their lack of compassion. As a result of the prophetic challenge that he laid at their feet, he would be strung up on a cross, mocked and reviled by them simply because he stood his ground, refusing to accept a world ruled by wrong ways, wrongheadedness, and wrong beliefs, unwilling to compromise his Father’s want for the world.
It was the baptism that we hear him speak of today, knowing full well that a world ruled by evil would not take kindly to his exposing the wickedness and corruption underneath the polish and the power. His cross fully demonstrated the battle lines that had been drawn between good and evil, on one side found compassion, tolerance, and love, on the other side found greed, intolerance, and enmity towards others.
Seen in this way, Jesus’ words to his followers make perfect sense. Those who stand beside his cross should expect a fight to the end from the other side where those with hammer and nails stand waiting to crucify the next one who would want to change the way that the world does business. It is easy to see how the line cuts through families as well as citizens, persons choosing either to align themselves with the Kingdom of God or with the kingdoms of the world.
As I see it, the problem that we face today is the same that the Pharisees faced when Rabbi Jesus stood before them. And that is the hypocrisy and duplicity that too many of us allow ourselves without second-thought. We are quick to say we are Christians, meaning we follow the ways of the Christ who died on the cross, but our words are contradicted every day by our actions.
Somehow, we are able to distort and contort the teachings of Jesus so that we can comfortably persecute the powerless, disenfranchise the poor, and imprison the foreigner, all the while arguing that we are following the ways of Jesus, embracing his love, justice, and lifting up of the marginalized. Truly, it is cognitive dissonance at its best.
We claim Christianity all the while we do not practice Christianity, never batting an eye at the lie we tell ourselves, convincing ourselves by clever mind tricks or manipulation of scripture that we are righteous and just when, in fact, our beliefs and our behaviors are as far removed from the ways and words of Jesus as humanly possible.
As a result, too many of us are fighting the wrong war. Like the Pharisees, we parade our self-righteousness in the public square, putting on the Christian title like a change of clothes, but in no way showing the compassion, decency, and respect for others that the Christ showed to one and all, instead making enemies of those who are truly the ones most like Christ, that is the poor, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised.
So, as we listen to Jesus’ words today that he has come to set the earth on fire, we may want to ask ourselves if we are truly fighting his fight, or if we are fighting against the very principles and peoples he held dear to his heart. When the day is done, it matters little to nothing if we are the first to call ourselves Christian believers. If our practices and attitudes aren’t those of Jesus in full, then we are charlatans, no different than little children playing dress-up, fooling no one but ourselves.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 