By Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD
Jeremiah 23.23-20 Psalm 82
Hebrews 11.29-12.2 Luke 12.49-56
When I prepare a sermon, as I meditate on the scripture, I always ask myself “where is the good news?” That’s something I learned from one of our great Canadian preachers, Herbert O’Driscoll. What is this week’s good news?
But the good news is not so easily apparent this week. The words of the prophet Jeremiah in our first reading, and the words of Jesus in the gospel reading, seem pessimistic, threatening, even angry. But the epistle to the Hebrews has some words of hope that can illuminate the real good news behind the apparent gloom in the other readings.
Jeremiah was a prophet who always seemed gloomy. No one ever listened to him, no one paid attention to the word of God as Jeremiah spoke it to the people. He must have felt like parents whose kids ask for their advice and the parents say, “why should I tell you – you never listen to me anyway!” God himself seems frustrated in this passage: “Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord.” God goes on to chastise the false prophets, those who speak their own words and don’t listen to the words of God, prophets who base their sayings on their own dreams and fantasies. But Jeremiah speaks the true word of God, and that word, says the Lord, is like fire, like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces. It’s a judgment on God’s covenanted people who have lost their way.
In the gospel today Jesus is speaking prophetically and in words very like Jeremiah’s: “I came to bring fire to the earth” he says. Fire in the scriptures is almost always associated with judgment, but also with healing, cleansing and refining. And Jesus is aware that this fire – which is really his own ministry – is going to be fire for him, too. “I have a baptism with which to be baptized,” he says, “and what stress I am under until it is completed!” The word “baptism” here refers to being submerged or drowned – not in water in this case, but it reflects Jesus’ feeling of being overcome by the evil around him. Jesus was baptised in water at the beginning of his ministry. Now he faces the baptism of the cross near the end of his ministry.
But these images of fire and drowning also reflect the reality of what we human beings have done to our own home planet. You can’t have lived through this past summer and not be aware of how climate change and other human-made changes like over-development have brought fire and flood to the earth.
Jesus knows that his teaching causes political upheaval and division because like Jeremiah it comes with a judgement – not only against the Roman occupiers in Palestine at the time, but against Jesus’ own people. The Jewish people expected that the Messiah would vindicate them, but in fact Jesus the Messiah brings words of judgement on a nation that has not followed God’s word, God’s law.
The words that follow are dark and frightening, and they cast a cloud among Jesus’ hearers: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Jesus doesn’t say this because he wants to cause division. Rather, he is saying that this is the inevitable outcome of speaking the truth. He speaks of households being divided, father against son, mother against daughter. He is saying that a false “togetherness” or a false unity is not what God wants, but the real unity of purpose that comes from following God’s law.
And then Jesus goes on to challenge people to read the signs of the times. They know how to read the signs of nature he says – a cloud in the west means rain, a south wind means scorching heat. But they don’t know how to read the signs in the political and religious sphere around them. It is not unlike us. We are very good at predicting the weather – but not very good at interpreting what is happening in the world around us.
On Friday evenings I always listen to the news on US public television and my favourite American journalist, David Brooks, compared the gradual erosion of democratic processes in the United States to the old story about what happens if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and turn up the heat. The process of being boiled alive is so gradual that the frog doesn’t recognize it till it’s too late. That belief has been refuted by scientists, but the analogy is perfect for Jesus’ comment in our gospel:
“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
And so, Jesus’ warning is for us, too. We too need to follow him, to be faithful to the covenant we have made in our baptism. But in the midst of all this, where is the good news? I believe it can best be summed up in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. The writer of this letter is an anonymous Hebrew Christian who is writing to give hope and encouragement to Christians under persecution in the first century of the church. Writing as he is some 50 or so years after Jesus’ death, he has a perspective on Jesus’ life that the disciples who were with Jesus in his life couldn’t have.
He reminds his readers of all the witnesses who have gone before them – judges, kings, and prophets of Israel who had to overcome persecution themselves. But as much as they were commended for the faith, the writer tells us, “They did not receive what was promised since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” In other words, the faith of all these people is only brought to fruition in us, in each generation. We are all in this together. God’s plan includes us. Jesus talked of how there would be division in the community because of him, and indeed there was – it led to his death. But the hope held out to us in the letter to the Hebrews is that in the fulfilment of God’s plan, we will be brought together as one community. The final words of our reading from Hebrews sums it up. We are surrounded, the writer says, by a great cloud of witnesses – what we call the Communion of Saints – not just the “official” saints of the Church and heroes of the Bible, but the community of all the faithful ones who have gone before us. Members of our own friends and family are among that great cloud of witnesses that surround us as we gather at the altar for communion, because communion for us is a foretaste of the joy that they experience in the near presence of God. Their presence among us, and the promise of eternal life that this cloud of witnesses holds out to us, is indeed Good News. They form with us a community that crosses boundaries of time and space.
So when the priest invites us to sing the Sanctus during the Eucharistic Prayer, it is prefaced by the words “with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven”– the saints and heroes, and the faithful ones we have loved who have gone before us. Think of them surrounding
us, upholding us as we face the challenges and joys of being disciples of Christ.
So let us not lose heart. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says,
“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding the shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”