For Sunday, August 14, 2016 – Luke 12:49-56
No doubt about it, Jesus’ teachings can be difficult. Maybe he wants to shake us from the complacency of a quiet discipleship and the comfortable rhythms we come to enjoy. Maybe he sees how we tend to choose cozy companions and soft, safe prayers, so sometimes, instead of whispering more sweet blessing in our ear, he shouts: “Wake up!” He knows we don’t always need more assurance; what we need sometimes is to wake up and face what’s happening. “I have come to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus says, “and I wish it were already kindled! Don’t you see what is happening? I have a baptism to go through, and great is the stress I am under until it is completed.”
Fire? Stress? Are these, too, the marks of following Jesus? They are not the usual images we have of the Prince of Peace or the promises of our baptism. Jesus says he has not come to bring peace to the earth, but division. We can expect families and households to be divided—fathers and mothers against sons and daughters, and the in-laws too. He doesn’t say he wants it to be this way, but that it simply will be this way. Just as the clouds rise in the west and you know it is going to rain, he tells the crowds, or the south wind is followed by scorching heat, so you can count on things being torn apart before they are bound back together.
Having just come through the narrow gate of my mother’s sudden death, I see how easy it is for things to tear apart. What we have learned to anticipate is not necessarily the way it is. Families bound together by the sturdy thread of one person’s presence sometimes fly apart, while frayed relationships sometimes start to mend. Stress can utterly deplete us, while the humility of our newfound weakness can help to build us up. Even Jesus feels the stress. Even he wishes it could be otherwise. But the fire does not keep him from completing the promise of his baptism. Despite how much we wish our lives, our world’s life, were already healed and whole, we can choose again and again to join God’s healing, mending work. We can submit to the fire of our baptism, trusting the master welder to forge us together into a new kind of family, divided no more.
