Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ + Amen.
“I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
Dear friends in Christ, sometimes the Lord places before us hard words to hear, words we’d rather not be given. This just might be one of those times. In this gospel reading for today we’re given words straight from the mouth of Jesus that seem much more at home in some other kind of congregation rather than at a Lutheran church. Jesus literally preaches fire and brimstone here. At first glance, even your pastor stares at this reading and thinks: “wow, how am I going to find a way to bring the Gospel to these people this time?” I know that I legitimately asked myself this when I read the readings for this Sunday.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is a lot of things to a lot of people. To those who do not know Christ in faith, He still has a pretty reasonable reputation in our society, at least for now. Jesus is known to the world as a wise, good teacher. In the Gospels, Jesus teaches a lot of things that most people in the world enjoy hearing: care for the needy, give to the poor, don’t be racist, listen to women, and to do unto others what you’d want done to you. For the most part, Christians and Non-Christians can agree that all of these things are just generally good principles for life. Beyond this, Christians know that Christ is so much more than a good teacher. He is our redeemer, our healer, the one who brings us the gifts of life and loves us. Even when we look at the horror of the cross, we +++++++as Christians see it as a sign of God’s forgiveness, that the wrath of God is poured out on Christ instead of us and that in the cross we have been made part of His family and given the gift of eternal life. But both Christians and Non-Christians would agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a peacemaker, right? Jesus taught to love your enemies, and to pray for those who persecute you! Obviously, Jesus is a man whose life was about peace, right?
With this sort of thinking the words we receive in our Gospel teaching can be quite a shock. Jesus says here that he did not come to bring peace on earth, but rather division. How do we rectify this with everything else we know about the Lord Jesus? The short answer is that we don’t, Jesus does that for us.
Our Lord Jesus says in this text that He came to cast fire upon the earth. We all know that fire is a destructive force. It can wipe out whole cities and forests extremely quickly. Fire kills nearly everything it touches. If Jesus came to save and make alive, why does He say that He came to bring fire on our world?
While we normally just think of fire as something destructive and deadly, when we look at the world God has created around us we can see that fire is actually able to help bring life and refinement. Wildfires are natural disasters that occur across the planet, usually started by a bolt of lightning. When these fires ignite they can take down entire stretches of forest, blazing through anything in their path. For quite some time our national park rangers worked hard to fight these naturally occurring fires, until they realized that the fires were actually benefitting the forest! See, when a wildfire blazes through a forest, it removes all of the dead material that has fallen to the forest floor. The dead material on the ground had prevented new growth of plants at the forest floor, and so the fire allows new plants to grow, which also gives food for the animals that live there. The canopy of trees above is cleared, allowing sunlight to give growth to the plants below. Beyond this, all the dead material that burns away is turned into ash, which puts their nutrients back into the soil, enriching what grows there even more. This clearing away of what is dead helps ensure that the forest lives, and even thrives after the fire passes.
The fire that Jesus casts upon the earth is somewhat like these wildfires. Without Jesus, sin covers the whole of the earth. The wickedness that we all inherit from our first parents, Adam and Eve, threaten to kill us and everything around us. Without Jesus, we have no hope. To remain in the “status quo” of sin might seem normal, like a forest without fire to those national park rangers, but it ultimately is more destructive than the fire Christ Himself brings. And so Christ ignites the fires to burn it all away.
The cross of Christ is that bolt of fire that the Lord uses to reshape the world. Christ talks of His cross as His “baptism” that He awaits in His ministry. In His baptism by John in the Jordan, Christ takes upon Himself all the sin of the world, all the sin cast off of us in our own baptisms, and prepares Himself to take it to the cross. At the cross, he burns all of that sin away. This fire of the cross brings us all new life as He burns our sin away and brings us to new life in our own baptisms, restored in those waters like plants that grow after a wildfire.
But the fire is still one that burns. It is still one that destroys. While those who have faith in the lord are brought life and renewal in this fire, not all people desire the heat. The world around us, especially as Christianity becomes less and less the norm, does not understand the cross. They see Jesus only as the teacher and peacemaker, not the restorer and redeemer, paying the price through blood. The truth of the cross confronts us all with our shortcomings and sinfulness. This reconciliation with Christ won for us through the cross comes after the proclamation and confrontation with the Law: we are all sinners, deserving of death, to the point where the Son of God was crucified and died for that. Yet, the world does not want to hear this. People do not want to be confronted with their sins. They do not want to hear that they must stop seeking out sexual pleasure outside of God’s gift of marriage. They do not want to hear that hatred of others, no matter how much they have sinned against us, is unacceptable and we ought to pray and even forgive those who sin against us. They do not want to hear that the prioritization of the self and the desire for comfort ignores the service we should be giving to our neighbor. The world does not want to hear the Word of God when it calls out their sin, nor does it want to hear that Christ Jesus is the only way to eternal life. Here, there is this division that Christ Jesus warns us that He brings with Him.
We in the Church are divided from those in our lives that are not one with Christ. It is a sad fact. As Christians, it should be no surprise that there are those in our lives that resist the message of Hope that comes only through Jesus. As we heard in our reading from Jeremiah today, there are those who will preach that no ill will come toward us, that we should expect that “everything will be okay.” This, sadly, is false teaching. Here in our Gospel and elsewhere in the scriptures, Jesus tells us very plainly that the lives of those who follow Him will be lives of suffering, of division from the world that may even bring us persecution, or even the threat of death.
Yet, we are not without sin ourselves. We sin continually and are drawn by our sinful natures to divide ourselves from God. The very same things that create division between non-believers and the church can tug at our hearts and tempt us to seek our own pleasures and desires over our unity with Christ. But, like a wildfire blazing through a forest, Christ promises to burn all this away, all this deadness in our sin. The Holy Spirit gives to us the gift of repentance, from which our sin is purged in the eyes of God, and our new life in Him rises from the ashes.
The division and fire that Christ teaches us about today may be shocking to us, seeming to be against His nature as our Redeemer and Life Bringer, but it is an important element to the truth of our relationship with Him and the World that we live in. Our lives as Christians will not be without suffering and struggle. We will be divided from those who are not in Christ and hated by the world because of Him. Yet Christ still is the Prince of Peace, the one who brings us the “Peace that Passes all Understanding.” Christ brings peace to those who know him, the peace that can only come through Him. In Christ our sins are washed away by our baptism and we are refined by the fire Christ casts upon the earth through the Cross. While this division will continue in the world until the Last Day, Christ, even now, unites us to Himself in His gifts, granting us a peace that overcomes it all.
In the Holy Name of Jesus + Amen.