LK 12: 49-59 

Laterally Luke…Pentecost + 10… Revised 2019

Entry points I can see for preaching our passage include: Jesus as Fire, Jesus & Baptism, Peace v Conflict, Family relationships, discerning the signs of the times, righting wrongs….But I’ll focus here on just one: Jesus as Fire.

Charles Wesley wrote the words of  ‘Gentle Jesus, meek & mild’. Was he racing to produce a hymn to meet a deadline, & didn’t discern what he was saying? If we ever have to meet preaching deadlines, beware lest we fall into any ‘gentle, meek, & mild’, or any other kind, of mis-portrayal of Our Lord! He’s far from any of those things!

“I came to set the earth on fire” is hard. In 3:16, though, LK reports John the Baptiser speaking of Jesus as coming to ‘baptise with Holy Spirit & Fire’. Might this be a clue to how Jesus understands God’s love & God’s Fire as being two sides of one coin? I suggest this might repay exploring. The Spirit of Jesus is God’s love in action, & love often faces hard going. What gets Jesus crucified - His baptism of blood - is the un-wavering love He offers us all. Would a ‘gentle Jesus’ have been worth crucifying?

God is love. Fire may be the other side of the love coin, but it's still love. Hard love, costly love that will inevitably bring disunity, division, judgment, & even destruction, as well as those Fruits & Gifts of the Spirit we find it easier to preach. Perhaps we can explore whether there’s some ‘costly love’ we need to fan into fire?

In the Gospel of Thomas (10) Jesus says he's 'guarding the fire until it blazes’¹ Was that the kind of imagery Wesley has in mind when writing his great hymn: ‘O thou who camest from above, the fire celestial to impart…’? (A hymn we might consider singing today?) How do we ‘guard’ the fire except we keep it blazing in the rough & tumble of life situations to which Jesus refers here? What might that cost us? How far are we prepared to go in exploring that? How far are we prepared to stand up for a Jesus not at all meek, not at all mild?

Brian

Afterthought: A story from the days of the Christian Desert Hermits has one of them, anxious about his spirituality, coming to a fellow hermit & saying, “I keep all the rules of the Community, I fast, I study the Bible, I meditate, I avoid bad thoughts…what more do I need to do? The one he approaches doesn’t answer in words, but stretches out his hand towards heaven, & his fingers become flashing  lamps of fire. Then he simply says to his questioner, “Why not become changed into fire?” Why not, indeed?