Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Father Stephen Bankemper

Contributor

We have from Scripture many images of God that are comforting — Jesus as the Good Shepherd (John, chapter 10), who leads us safely through death and darkness (Psalm 23); Jesus, come not as judge but savior (the famous John 3:17); and many more. There are also many passages in Scripture that show a different side, so to speak, of God, with which we are not so comfortable, for example, God who destroys the wicked (Psalms 101 and 92), raining down brimstone and fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). The image we hear in the Gospel for this weekend — the image of fire — is hard to put in one or the other category, but it is worthwhile to contemplate both its “positive” and “negative” aspects.

“I have come to set the earth on fire,” Jesus says to his disciples, “and how I wish it were already blazing!” What is this fire our Lord desired to set?

In his book God and the World, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, wrote, “When Jesus talks about fire, he means in the first place his own Passion, which was a Passion of love and was therefore a fire; the new burning bush, which burns and is not consumed . . .” (p. 222) This is a fire with which we can feel comfortable, the fire of God’s love that saves and frees us. And yet, it is a fire, as Benedict continues, “that is to be handed on. Jesus does not come to make us comfortable; rather he sets fire to the earth; he brings the great living fire of divine love, which is what the Holy Spirit is, a fire that burns.” (ibid.)

This is a fire that, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, brings, not peace but division. This is a fire that makes us uncomfortable because it divides, not just “three against two and two against three,” but even divides us from ourselves. When we accept God as our God, we allow into ourselves and our lives a “consuming fire,” (Hebrews 12:29) a “devouring fire, a jealous God,” (Deuteronomy 4:24), a God who desires all of us, who wants to be our first love (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength . . . ”) a God who consumes anything in us that is not of God, because in his presence no evil can abide. Do we want this fire?

We tend to think and talk of heaven, hell, and purgatory as three different “places,” but in the last few years I have found myself thinking of them as one place: the presence of God. (I am not claiming this to be Church teaching; it is only an idea, an image.) God, who is all Love, burns eternally with this love. Those who resolutely refuse to let themselves be changed by this love and cling to their sin and selfishness and other loves, are only made miserable by this flaming love, and are thus in eternal hell. Those who desire to be transformed but struggle to abandon themselves to love, who still hold on to some of their own will and other loves, experience God’s love and presence as consuming flames, as purgatory, until they are able to let go of all in themselves that is not God. But those who have given themselves over to God, seeking only His will, and who have let themselves be purified and love God with all their hearts, souls, and strength, rejoice in the Fire, because they themselves are on fire, burning joyfully with God, and are, as Benedict puts it, made “bright and pure and free and grand.”

Many of the saints not only knew about this consuming and purifying fire but experienced it and desired it. Read, for example, St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s experience of God’s fire of love. In her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love she expresses her desire for this love, even as she knows it will destroy her. It is telling that she uses the word “martyr” in her prayer, and “holocaust” — not “sacrifice”: in a sacrifice, part of the animal was consumed by fire, while as a holocaust the entire animal was consumed. The following is a short excerpt:

“In order to live in one single act of perfect love, I offer myself as a victim of Holocaust to your merciful love, asking you to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to over- flow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your Love, O my God!”

Another saint worth consulting in this context is St. Gemma Galgani, a 20th-century Italian mystic, who described her heart as “all on fire with the love of Jesus.” In a letter to her spiritual director, St. Gemma describes her experience of God’s love as an actual physical burning: “For the last eight days I have felt something mysterious in the area of my heart that I cannot understand. . . this fire has increased, oh so much, as to be almost unbearable. I should need ice to put it out, and it hinders my eating and sleeping. It is a mysterious fire that comes from within, then goes to the outside. It is, however, a fire that does not torment me, rather it delights me, but it also exhausts and consumes me . . . Great God, how I love You! Oh, how I love You!”

Her spiritual director related that “When I questioned her about it, Gemma herself had to acknowledge that the suffering that she felt from this mysterious fire, although it was a joy to her, was really very painful. She said to me: ‘In order to get some idea of it, imagine a red-hot iron, kept constantly heated in a furnace, has been placed into the very center of this poor heart. Thus I feel myself burning’. And yet she would not have exchanged this excruciating torture for all the delights of the world. For while she thus suffered in her body, the sweetness it caused in the depths of her soul was truly beyond all description. Thus in ecstasy she exclaimed, “Come then, Oh Jesus! Your heart is a flame and you wish mine to be turned into a flame as well … Jesus, I feel I must die when you are throbbing so in my heart.”

Jesus expressed the desire that the fire of his Passion and love was already blazing. It will blaze if we surrender to His love and allow ourselves to burn  with it. One of the invocations in the chaplet of St. Michael is, “By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial choir of Seraphim, may the Lord make us worthy to burn with the fire of perfect charity.” May we be willing to let that love consume us, so that we may spread that fire to others.

Father Stephen Bankemper is pastor, St. Catherine of Siena Parish, Ft. Thomas, Ky.