20th Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
OLR, NOLA
This
is NOT the Comfortable Middle-Class Jesus of the modern Church. The
mild-mannered Jesus of our therapeutic culture. The peace-nik-hipster
Jesus of the fashionable fringe. The tolerant, diversity-loving,
social worker who never judges, never demands. Nope. The Jesus we
hear tonight is the Jesus born and bred into an ancient prophetic
tradition that requires its hearers to take sides, to make choices,
to hunker down and endure the consequences of those choices. Come
what may. There's no parsing-away his words here so that we can
re-establish our image of a bland Messiah who only wants us to be
nice to one another. He says what he says, “I have come to set the
earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! Do you think
that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but
rather division.” This is the part of the homily where most
preachers will tell you what he Really Means here. The part where
they will bleach out all the color, wring out all the vigor, and iron
away any inconvenient wrinkles lest you experience a single moment of
discomfort or challenge. But we know our history, and we know that
following Christ means creating division and setting the world on
fire!
The
very last thing the Church needs right now is a Bureaucrat Jesus; a
Therapist Jesus. Nor do we need a Lawyer Jesus or a Cop Jesus.
Looking at the state of the Church and the trajectory some have
chosen for her, I believe that what the Church needs is a Prophet
Jesus – a Jesus that can and will call to his Body, the Church, to
a radical holiness, a fundamental set-apartness that allows us to
understand ourselves as Christs-in-progress. Not just Mass-goers or
members of a parish. But as men and women who have been truly and
thoroughly purified in the fires of divine love and set upon the path
toward glory. If you are on this path, if you are indeed purified in
the fires of divine love, then your daily life should be a life of
division, conflict, and even warfare with the world around you. I
don't mean that you should be violent, or behave like a jerk at the
office, or be offensive to those you meet. I mean that everything you
are should rebel instinctively against the reach and grasp of a world
that's trying to seduce you, to draw you into its dark network of
Christ-denying philosophies and practices. The battleground is your
immortal soul. And though Christ has already won this war on the
cross, we must remain in him to share his victory.
So,
you might ask: How do I remain in Christ? Well, Therapist Jesus will
ask you how the challenges of holiness make you feel, and affirm you
in your OK-ness. Cop Jesus will want to know if you're following the
Law, and he'll remind you that he's always watching for infractions.
Bureaucrat Jesus will tell you that holiness is a procedure,
requiring assessment, feedback, and accreditation. But Prophet Jesus
will answer your question with a question: “Do you think that I
have come to establish peace on the earth?” And while you're
floundering around for an answer, he'll shout, “NO! I have come to
set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!”
Then you will know that to remain in Christ is to be burned by the
world, to be rejected, and turned away b/c you refuse to hide the
divine love you carry, b/c you will not fail in bearing witness to
the purification that freed you and frees you from sin and death. To
remain in Christ, to share in his victory on the cross is to make
your life – every part of your life – a rebuke of the world, a
challenge to the death-loving culture that boils around us. And that
is why we carry conflict, division, and even warfare with us
everywhere we go. Not b/c we are angry or violent. . .but b/c we
belong to Christ.
I
will say again what I have said to you many times over the past seven
years: being a follower of Christ is about becoming Christ in the
world. It's not about feeling a certain way about God; or filling out
the correct paperwork in the correct way; or following all the rules
and keeping your nose clean; or being nice to your annoying
neighbors. Our Lord Jesus Christ did not suffer torture and death on
the cross to show us how to be good, upstanding, middle-class
taxpayers. He suffered and died to free us from sin and death. He set
the world on fire with his Good News so that nothing created would
escape his invitation to receive God's freely offered mercy. He sent
the purifying flames of the Holy Spirit upon the Church so that we
would have the courage to be witnesses to his sacrifice, so that we
would be equipped to give a reason for our hope in the resurrection.
He didn't die to make us cowards in the face of the world's
seduction. He died to make us saints and martyrs to the Truth – the
Truth that set us free and sets us free everyday. If you will remain
in him, then do as he does: set
the world on fire with divine love.
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