A woman named Lily came to counseling because she wanted to save her troubled marriage. Not that her husband Dave was a bad guy. On the contrary, everyone liked him for his agreeable, easygoing nature. But he aggravated his wife, because he never seemed to have an opinion of his own about anything. “Whatever you want, hon”—that was Dave’s motto.
She confided to the counselor: “At first, I thought he was just being generous and self-sacrificing. But it’s getting to the point where I just don’t feel like he cares about anything. It doesn’t matter what I ask him. ‘What color do you want to paint our bedroom?’ ‘Which school do you think we ought to send our kids to?’ It’s always the same: ‘Whatever you want, hon.’’”
“And if I try to bring up anything that makes him uncomfortable, like the household budget or his mother, he totally shuts down. Sometimes I feel like I married a ghost.”
“My friends and family approved of my marriage to Dave, always saying what a nice guy he was. But I can really use a little less nice, and a lot more passion and investment in our lives.”
It would be easy to criticize Dave for his passivity. But if we’re honest, we’d probably see something of ourselves in Dave. How many of us go along just to get along? How many of us turn a blind eye to the problems in our home or in our community, because we just don’t want the hassle? It seems that in our current social climate, there are more of us like this than before.
So why don’t we take initiative and act with resolve, when we know it’s the right thing to do? Is it because we are bad people? Not necessarily. We don’t act, because we long for peace. But because we tell ourselves that peace is neither possible nor worth the effort, we pass it up. We settle for quiet instead.
This is something Jesus refused to do. Indeed, he cannot settle for quiet, even if he wanted to. His very presence provokes a crisis among the people to whom God sent him. That seems clear on virtually every page of the Gospel accounts as they have come down to us. “What will you do with this one called Jesus?” That is the question that his presence poses, both then and now. It does not allow “I am neutral about him” as an option. One has to decide either for him or against him.
“Do you think I have come to bring peace to this earth? No, I tell you, but division” (Luke 12:51). But it’s actually worse than that. The word translated “division” here is stronger in the original. The word has the force of “bitter dissension” or “hostile division.”
“From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; They will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:52-53).
He provokes a crisis not only in the conscience of the individual, but also in the center of close family relationships.
But why does he have this significance? I mean, of the many who have gone before and of the many who have come after him, why should we single out this one man and make the claim that all is at stake in the decision to accept or reject him?
This is why Jesus and the gospel have been seen as a stumbling block and a rock of offense. When the old patriarch Simeon held the infant Jesus in his arms at the temple, he uttered this ominous prophecy: “This one is destined for the rise and fall of many in Israel, and will be a sign spoken against” (Luke 2:34).
This is not how Jesus himself would want it. He is angry with those to whom he was sent. They should have known better. They can interpret the signs in the sky that will tell them the kind of weather they will have. But they do not know how to interpret the present time (Luke 12:56).
If they did, they would know what would bring them true peace, but now it is hidden from their eyes. For they refused to recognize the time of God’s coming to them (Luke 19:42, 44).
But how could it be otherwise? In a world that’s gone wrong, those who come to us speaking the truth and embodying the truth, are going to be opposed.
Now if the world were perfect, if it were in line with God’s will, then those who come to us speaking the truth would be welcome with open arms. But you and I know that that’s not the world we live in.
“I came to bring fire to this earth” (Luke 12:49). Such a world as ours needs fire. With this statement Jesus announces his mission. The original is somewhat stronger: he came to cast or throw a fire on this earth.
It is a rather startling, if not a positively scary image, isn’t it? What might we understand him to be saying?
Consider a forest fire for a moment. In recent years conditions of prolonged drought in the West have given rise to terrible fires that have wrecked enormous devastation. Fires destroy. We see images of this destruction too often on the evening news. But fires also control the spread of invasive species and encourage the growth of native vegetation. That is why wildlife management services conduct controlled burning for forest preservation. Fires allow for renewed growth.
Jesus came to cast fire on this earth, so that old forms of life that are decaying, as a result of the invasive species of sin, can be burned away, and something new can emerge.
Think for a moment about what this means when we invite Jesus into our lives. This is not the Jesus of the popular imagination. This is not “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” When Jesus comes, he is going to light a fire that burns away all that needs to be destroyed—our envy, our dishonesty, our petty self-centeredness, for example. All these things need to be cleared away so that new growth can emerge.
Lush and fertile growth has always been God’s original intent, as we see in our Old Testament lesson.
Jerusalem is compared to a vineyard which God planted and cultivated and protected. God did everything to ensure its flourishing. It was to be a rich and profusive vineyard, teeming with good grapes.
We have here an image of a healthy and productive community, where people enjoy peace and prosperity. It was intended to be free from injustice, corruption, and violence, which has always been God’s original intent for human community. But the people resisted God. Instead of good fruit, they produced bad.
God then enters into a legal dispute with his people. Judge between me and my vineyard! What more could I have done to it to ensure its flourishing?
God’s case is proved. He pronounces judgement. What was intended to be a lush and fertile vineyard turns instead into a barren waste, overgrown with briars and thorns. Such a vineyard invites the fire of divine judgment, the controlled burning of all that suppresses and chokes out healthy growth.
All this sounds ominous and dire and even depressing. But there is no soft pedaling it. The Lord is the judge. And in the New Testament, he entrusts this office of judge to his Son Jesus. “For God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed, as the Apostle Paul declares to the Athenians (Acts 17:21). As we recite in the Apostles Creed: “he sitteth at the right hand of God, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”
Jesus is indeed judge. But the good news is that it is Jesus who is the judge. What we mean to say is that if he is judge, he is at the same time the one who is judged, even for the sin of rejecting him. In this regard, we can say that he places himself in solidarity with a world on fire. In the memorable phrase of the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, Jesus is the judge judged in our place.
“I have a baptism with which I have to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50).
Baptism here is a reference to his approaching death. Remember what we said a moment ago—that in a world gone wrong, those who speak the truth, and embody the truth in their lives, are going to be opposed? Here Jesus anticipates that the opposition he faces will lead to his death.
But baptism here refers not only to death, but to death on a cross. And the cross is a symbol of divine judgment. For Jesus to undergo baptism means to be inundated by the floodwaters of divine judgement, if we are allowed to change the metaphor.
We need to be clear. The crucifixion is indeed an act of divine judgment. But it is not an act of God against Jesus, which is a common misunderstanding. Rather, it is an act by God through Jesus against sin and death.
God himself through the cross of Jesus clears away all that suppresses and chokes out the life that God intends for us, for his people. We mean here, of course, sin and death, which God removes from us in the cross, where Jesus bears them, and in bearing them, bears them away.
This is good news that the church is compelled to proclaim to the world. This news should be in our hearts like a fire, a fire shut up in our bones, that we would be unable to contain, to paraphrase the language of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 20:9).
Now we may not use this language exactly when we reflect on what happens inside us when we hear and understand and accept the good news of Jesus Christ, but it does name something that ought to resonate with us.
In fact, we still have the phrase, “fire in the belly” in our language. When we of someone that he has a fire in his belly, we mean that he has drive, motivation, passion. For example, “I watched Tom Brady play with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and there’s still fire in his belly.”
The fire that Jesus came to bring to the earth, the fire of divine judgment to which he submitted himself, so that we may have freedom from the condemnation of sin and new life in him—that fire ought to light a fire in our bellies, a fire that motivates us to begin every day of our life with a new eagerness to serve God, to have no other end in view in all our actions than his honor.
And when this happens, we will no longer be like Dave. We will no longer be apathetic, captive to the sin of indifference, the sin of ignoring a relationship or a situation that we know to be unhealthy or unjust, either because we think it would be too hard to deal with or because we just don’t care.
That is sloth, and sloth is the devil’s counterfeit to true peace.
True peace comes from God. It is not a cheap peace, but a costly peace, which involved no less than the cross on which his Son hung and died.
By this cross, God reconciled us to himself and to one another. This is an accomplished fact. Should it not make a difference in how we handle the conflicts we have with others? Should it not make us eager to seek peace and pursue it? (cf. Psalm 34:14).
Every time we reject sloth’s temptation to powerlessness and instead act intentionally in a manner that brings God’s peace to bear on every situation we face, we take a step towards the order in which God intends us to live. In doing so, we experience a peace that satisfies the God-given longing for true peace.
To this end, let us allow Jesus to light a fire in us. Amen.