20th Sunday of Ordinary Time (18.08.13)
FIRE AND DIVISION
‘Fire’ and ‘Division’ are words that carry a sense of impact and action. To each person, they have particular meanings while, simultaneously, sharing a commonality intelligible to all. Creating a collage of individuals’ particularised understanding would fill the heavens and beyond. Were you to invite a group of friends to extemporise their thoughts on these two words, give them time to reflect before speaking, you will be amazed at the resulting variation in interpretation.
Jesus uses these words in the Gospel of St. Luke (12:49-53) for the 20th Sunday of Year ‘C’. He would have appreciated their impact upon not only his hearers at the time but also upon the unfolding generations of humanity down to our present. Jesus had come into the world to offend its mediocrity, evil and paralysing indifference. What is Jesus seeing in our reaction as his words reach us on this August Sunday in the year 2013? Some will be distracted and Jesus’ words will not register. Some will be only semi-listening. For them, Jesus’ words will be like the ribbon of ‘news’ running along the bottom edge of a live television picture, to which they may bear no reference. Others will hear them and be puzzled. Perhaps their remembrance of ‘Fire’ and ‘Division’ is embedded with pain – physical or emotional or both – and they have yet to move beyond that searing experience. Others, again, may ask the Holy Spirit to show them what was in Jesus’ mind as he spoke to the vast, unsettled, crowd mentioned by Luke. Like those early followers of Jesus, we too have a choice, now, in how we hear read or read these Gospel words for ourselves.
Jesus takes the concept of ‘fire’ further – “how I wish it (fire) were already blazing!” Will you choose to feed his ‘fire’, dowse it, or let it fizzle out? Physical fire cannot survive without an ample supply of oxygen. That’s why opening doors and windows, in the event of fire, is highly dangerous. Taking Jesus’ word to our heart, soul and mind enables his word to become more alive within us. The ‘oxygen’ required to create a blaze within our heart, soul and mind is our love for Jesus! Jesus cannot make us grow the love required; he may only invite us to show it. For him to do otherwise would be for God to infringe the free will with which He has endowed us. That is why our responses will be highly individual in both time and intensity.
The restless thousands who had gathered to hear Jesus over two thousand years ago (Luke 12:1) are replicated, today, worldwide in all known languages, peoples and circumstances. Jesus invites us, who hear his word, to take to our hearts the countless people who, in their relentless searching, are being pulled in every which way, except towards him. A familiar and helpful prayer is:
‘Come, O Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people
and kindle in them the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created (anew)
and you will renew the face of the earth.’
The prayer describes a work in progress involving all people. But the work is not progressing in each at a similar pace. This, in turn, implies the division of response that Jesus also speaks of:
“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 12:51-53)
The times and the manner of any personal response to God are unique because each person is a unique expression of God. Even when people assemble and speak with a single voice, as at a football match or some such occasion, what is heard is a vocalised, unified expression but it comes from an utterly diversified crowd divided by differing levels of commitment, race, belief, gender, age, outlook, background. Unity can never be achieved by uniformity. Chou en Lai may have dressed the Chinese people uniformly but that never made them one people, one nation.
The human process of growing towards God through Jesus happens only individually. Why? Because God values each of us as precious beyond reckoning and therefore the very diverse levels of love that each offers him is, to him, precious beyond reckoning. He will wait until our very last breath for even a glimmer of our freely given love … and that will suffice.
There’s a reputedly true story, from long ago, of a Redemptorist priest giving a mission in a Glasgow parish. The area was known as ‘The Gorbals’, on the south bank of the River Clyde renowned for its poverty, crime and disease. Endlessly climbing tenement steps and knocking on doors to find any Catholics living in the block was part of the mission. This day, the priest was knocking on a door and a woman on the same landing told him not to bother. “She’s a woman of the night, that one!” Surprisingly the door was opened by a little child who let the priest enter because his ‘Mam’ was sick. In a small, smelly room, the woman lay in bed facing the wall. She was dipping in and out of consciousness with a fever. The priest found a piece of cloth, soaked it in cold water and bathed her forehead while the child watched. The neighbour had followed the priest in and now said, “You’ll no be finding that one at church, no matter what you say!”
The wall towards which the sick woman’s face was turned was covered in cut out pictures, large and small, of people the media claimed as ‘stars’. The priest’s eye was caught by one small picture. It was a thin card, not a ‘cut out’, and it was directly in the sightline of the prone, sick woman. The priest recognised it! It was a ‘holy picture’ of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour replicated from the one in the Redemptorist church in Rome. A previous Pope had commended the promotion of devotion to Our Lady, under the title of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, the title of the picture, to the Redemptorist Order. The priest was sure that ‘holy picture’ was not on this woman’s wall by accident. Without hesitation he opened his case and anointed this ‘woman of the night’ with the Sacrament of the Sick. He had no idea whether she would survive or die but he was sure in his heart that she would, either way, be at peace with God. Back in the parish house he made sure the local St. Vincent de Paul Society members would follow up his visit and make sure there was some material help for mother and child.
Surely, the ‘anguish’ of which Jesus speaks in this Gospel extract
“There is a baptism with which I must be baptized,
and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!”
(Luke 12:50)
was assuaged a little that day in a Glasgow slum tenement through the fire in the heart of his holy Mother, Mary, our Lady of Perpetual Succour. The fire of divine love has the power to heal the divisions which evil attempts to open within us and between us. This story highlights another truth namely, that though our journey to God through fire and division is unique, we need each other! This is why Jesus calls us to a communion with him in his Body on Earth, his Church.
Two quotes from the First Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation express our prayer and hope.
“Look kindly, most compassionate Father, on those you unite to yourself by the sacrifice of your Son, and grant that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as they partake of this one Bread and one Chalice, they may be gathered into one Body in Christ, who heals every division…..
Never did you turn away from us and, though time and again we have broken your covenant, you have bound the human family to yourself through Jesus your Son, our Redeemer, with a new bond of love so tight that it can never be undone.”