Already Kindled

Scripture: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 20), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Good heavens. This is not the sort of thing we’re used to hearing from Jesus.

I think it’s fair to say that most of us have in our minds an image of Jesus as someone utterly imperturbable, never losing His cool—a mellow Jesus, a Zen Jesus. This Jesus does not judge, but only accepts. He forgives us, though we may be fuzzy as to what we’ve done wrong. Thus in the popular imagination Jesus becomes a sentimental figure, an inoffensive symbol of goodwill, like the Easter Bunny or Kaptain Kangaroo. But in truth Jesus challenged, scandalized, and enraged a whole host of powerful people. That’s why we crucified Him, after all. One need not crucify the Easter Bunny.

When Jesus talks about fire and judgment, when He talks about dividing sons against fathers and mothers-in-law against daughters-in-law, we get uncomfortable. And rightly so! We have good reason to be wary of religious zealots from the Middle East who preach the end of the world. See, it really comes down to who God is, what God is like. Is He a God of justice or of mercy? Of vengeance or of grace? Of death or of life?

Christians have struggled with this question. We really have, as have our Israelite forebears. Look to this morning’s reading from Jeremiah: the prophet is persecuted and reviled because he dares to speak a hard word of truth, the Word of God, which is “like fire and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces,” when all the people much prefer deceitful dreams from the lying prophets of a false god. There is such a thing as false mercy, a convenient grace that allows injustice to go unchallenged and that hides oppression beneath a guise of gentility. All merciful is no mercy at all.

There was a man in the early Church named Marcion who believed that the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ was only merciful, entirely gracious. He was so sure of this that he rejected any part of the Bible, Old Testament or New, that presented God as wrathful or vengeful or just. Needless to say, he had to throw out the entire Hebrew Bible, three of the four Gospels, and all but a handful of the Epistles. St Augustine, meanwhile, produced a rather unhelpful compromise, but one that’s proved enduringly popular nonetheless. Augustine treated God as though He were half-and-half, 50% just and 50% good. God, Augustine wrote, was good to the Christians and just to everyone else. In other words, He was merciful toward some, wrathful toward all the rest.

You can see how this picture tends to present us with a schizophrenic Jesus, horrible to His enemies and generous to His friends. Personally I find the idea of a God with multiple personality disorder to be deeply disturbing. Yet this is undeniably the dominant image presented to us in a lot of Christian popular culture today. How else can we reconcile two things seemingly so diametrically opposed as God’s justice and God’s mercy? For that, we may have to switch gears.

Let’s talk about the end of the world. Jesus talked about it a lot, so we probably should too. When one studies the early centuries of the Church, what we call the Church Fathers, one is struck by just how apocalyptic they really are. They’re always talking about the end; they’re always talking about the final Judgment. These days we think of apocalyptic preachers as nutcases, weirdos on street corners with placards that cry, “The end is night!” Or we think of doomsday cults: Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate.

Because of this, modern scholars will talk about “interim ethics,” the way you behave when you expect that the world is about to end. They read the New Testament and the Church Fathers thinking that Christians were packing their bags, ready for the sky to fall next Tuesday, and when that didn’t happen—when generations, then centuries, then millennia rolled by—the Church had to readjust her expectations, and downplay the apocalyptic element in her Scriptures. But this is to completely misunderstand what the early Church taught about the end of the world. For us, it wasn’t something that was going to happen tomorrow or next week or at the fourth blood moon. For early Christians the world had already ended—and now it was being reborn.

See, when the Church Fathers talk about “the end,” they don’t mean termination, the end of the line. They mean the point, the endgame, the purpose of the whole endeavor. Judgment Day wasn’t about destroying everything in fire and brimstone; it was about the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, when Heaven would descend to earth and God at last would be all in all. Then there would be no more shadows, no more death, no more lying, no more hell. But the Spirit of the Living God would fill all things, and everything in Creation, the entire cosmos, would join in the New Life of Jesus Christ, with all creatures bathed in the Goodness and Truth and Beauty intended by our Creator.

We tend to think that the blazing glories of Heaven and the eternal fires of hell are two separate things, but they’re the same fire. God is the fire. Do you understand? God is always the fire. When Jesus talks about separating sheep from goats at the Judgment, He’s separating the sin offering from the burnt offering before the Temple. And where do both go? Into the same fire. Into the same God. When God is all in all, there will be nowhere to run to escape His truth, nowhere to hide from His eternal life. For those who love God and love their neighbor, everywhere they look will be Heaven! And for those who hate God and despise their neighbor, everywhere they look will be hell.

This is the way that the world ends: with the Refiner’s Fire burning out of us all impurity and falsity and ugliness. The punishment for lies will be truth. The punishment for death will be life. The punishment for hate will be love. If we surrender our sins, offer up our false idols and our egos upon the Cross, then the Spirit of God will fill and subsume and remake us in a glorious ecstasy of Resurrection. But if we cling to our sins, to our false faiths and twisted wills, then we will suffer terribly. Truth hurts, you know. Yet even this suffering is not punishment for punishment’s sake—God is not a sadist—but it is to correct us, to purify us, to turn us home to the Father who loves us, who desires for us freely to accept the glories and honors for which He has fashioned us in body, mind, and soul. Only then will our wills truly be free.

That is the end. That is the purpose, the aim, God’s will for all things. It began on the Cross, when Jesus poured out His divine life for the world, descended to the dead, conquered hell, and rose triumphant from the grave and up into Heaven with all the ransomed souls of Hades resplendent in His train. That was the day that the old world broke upon the axle of the Cross, and the New Creation began in the Risen Jesus Christ. It continues to dawn upon us, here and now, as we fulfill our Lord’s command to preach the Gospel to all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it shall come to full harvest when at last we and all things surrender to death, surrender ourselves into God’s crucified hands, that He might raise us anew in Him, never to die again!

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” These are not the words of a passive and impotent God, content with the way things are. These are the words of the God-Man who cannot abide the tyranny of sin, death, the devil and hell, who cannot wait to overthrow the kingdom of Satan and inaugurate the Kingdom of God. His justice is our mercy; His mercy is our justice.

For the baptism with which He is to be baptized, which brings Him such stress until it is completed, is His death on the Cross, which will break the wheel of time and turn back the darkness of death. And the fire which He wishes to kindle on earth is the Holy Spirit of God, the same fire that blazed in the bush before Moses and in a pillar of flame and smoke before Israel, the fire which He pours out upon His faithful at Pentecost and that each and every one of us has received in Holy Baptism.

So you see, brothers and sisters, that it is not a question of whether God is merciful or God is just. These two are not opposed. Justice itself is a mercy, and mercy itself is just. They are the same! Both are nothing other than the fire of God’s own Truth, a fire that burns away all that is evil within us and purifies all that is good. Someday the fire of God’s Truth will burn away every falsehood, and we will see God as He truly is, face-to-face. And He will be just. And He will be merciful. And He will be all in all. And He will subsume us entirely in the fires of His love.

How I wish it were already kindled!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.