Archbishop of Sydney

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Jer 38:4-6, 8-10; Heb 12:1-14; Lk 12:49-53

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
19/8/2007

The three readings we have for today’s Mass are not the most cheerful in the Scriptures, because all of them emphasise the cost of discipleship for every God-fearer, including Our Lord himself and the great Old Testament prophets such as Jeremiah.

We must always remember that there is no cost free following of Christ.  We all have to keep running steadily in the race for salvation. Indeed this is always a good starting point to evaluate religious claims, because any religion which claims that it imposes no burden, makes no personal requirement on its followers is a sham. What is valuable always comes at a price and there is no human achievement without hard work and persistence.

There is something attractive in Our Lord’s claim that he has come to bring fire down on the earth, although we shall return to the topic of what the nature of this fire is. Probably the biggest danger today is from a deadly indifference and boredom.

It is more disconcerting to hear that Jesus has not come to bring peace on earth, but division and then read of the multiple types of family division although he does not list divisions between husbands and wives.

Counter examples to this passage quickly come to mind. The usual greeting of the bishop at the start of Mass is “peace be with you”. Also at Mass we exchange the sign of peace after reciting the Our Father to demonstrate that we are true followers of the Lord, and when we invoke three times the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, we twice ask for mercy and conclude by requesting that peace be granted to us.

I suppose too that all serious adult Catholics and Christians appreciate that there does come a Christian peace of heart, lying underneath whatever troubled situation in which we might find ourselves, intimately connected with a sense of purpose and direction based on the conviction that God loves us and has forgiven our sins through Jesus’ redeeming activity.

Before attempting to reconcile these apparent contradictions, we must remember again that as Catholics we are followers of the Christ revealed to us in the gospels, before we adhere to a set of principles or identify ourselves in a community of his followers. In fact all three activities cannot be separated and occur simultaneously, but the logical priority is that we are followers of Jesus.

It also goes without saying that we cannot blot out from our image of Jesus those gospel passages we find unacceptable or difficult. We have to wrestle with all the gospel teaching and the solemn teachings of the Catholic Church on Jesus, especially the teaching of the early Ecumenical Councils. The temptation of every age is to reshape Jesus in its own image and once in a while in today’s media, when I hear of the wimpish, all-tolerant Jesus who will approve of any sort of nonsense and many brands of evil, I wonder whether the speakers have read the gospels.

The first point to be made about the fire that Jesus brings is that it is the fire of love and it is certainly not the fire of hate and violence. Early Christianity did not expand through military conquest, but suffered 300 years of intermittent persecution. Jesus himself was a not a man of violence and told his friend Peter, in the garden of Gethsemane when he was betrayed by Judas, to put his sword away.

Secondly we have to acknowledge that the pure love of God, when injected into the human situation, provokes a moment of judgement (krisis is the Greek word), needs a decision between good and evil or faith and fear.  This comes not from God, but from the evil in men’s hearts. In the Lukan infancy narrative we hear that the child Jesus will cause “the fall and the rise of many in Israel” (Lk 2:34). A sword of sorrow pierced Mary’s soul at these words and later even some in Jesus’ family thought that he was out of his mind.

Jesus’ own baptism, which he mentions in this context, is an unusual word but refers to his later passion and death.

Early Christian history gives witness to the opposition of elements of both the Jewish and pagan populations against those who choose to follow the Lord.

Scripture scholars are sometimes reluctant to concede that the words we find in Jesus’ mouth in the gospels were actually spoken by him and they indulge in interesting and sophisticated reasoning to justify their excisions. However most New Testament scholars, including many of the liberals, believe these challenging words do come from the Lord himself.

We also find parallel sayings in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, probably the most respectable of the many apocryphal (or false) gospels. It is even possible, although we cannot be sure, that a genuine saying of Our Lord survives here or there in the apocrypha, which is not found in the four canonical gospels. In this gospel of Thomas, we hear Our Lord claiming “He who is near me is near the fire”.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us that Our Lord, “for the sake of the joy which was still in the future ... endured the cross, disregarding (its) shamefulness”. So we too should persevere in our Christian witness whatever the small, middly or large obstacles in the daily round of our duties.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen