In our Gospel this week, Jesus says, “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three,” etc.
I’m afraid with my summer travels I haven’t finished writing my Sunday reflections in a couple weeks. (I have several half finished!) But we remain in the context we’ve been in, in Luke 12:
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” Jesus said last week. But then, “Sell your possessions, and give to the needy.” Then he gave the principle: “Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
On the one hand, we have no reason to fear. God will provide! But that doesn’t mean we should settle into worldliness. To the contrary, our trust that God will provide is why we are not worldly, why we abandon earthly riches and trust in heavenly.
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The same dynamic comes out in our reading from the prophets this week. The princes say to the king, “Jeremiah ought to be put to death; he is demoralizing the soldiers who are left in this city . . . ; he is not interested in the welfare of our people, but in their ruin.”
(I just did a long personal study of Jeremiah. I recommend it: he’s the easiest to understand of the long prophets.)
The context is this: the Nothern Kingdom, called Israel, has been taken into exile. Judah, the Southern Kingdom, is under seige by the Babylonians. And the prophet Jeremiah says, “we deserve this.” God will protect us, he says—but first he will punish us. And we need to accept that punishment.
As always—as today—the people of his kingdom want a prophet who will say, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” but who will not say, “Sell your possessions and give to the needy.” They want an easy Gospel, what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” We all want Christianity without the cross. But there’s no such thing. That is not what the Christian God’s love for us means.
Jeremiah does care about them. But that care includes God’s “severe mercy.”
In fact, in our reading, Jeremiah dramatizes the whole thing. He is thrown in a cistern—a pit for gathering water—and sinks into the mud, until the king’s eunuch comes to his rescue. God protects Jeremiah, and he will protect us—but through our weakness, not through our strength, and through our acceptance of the hard road of conversion, not through cheap grace.
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Our reading from Hebrews shows the same thing with Jesus. “For the sake of the joy that lay before him” (that sounds nice!) “he endured the cross, despising its shame.” So too we have to “rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race.” God will come through—but it won’t be easy. That’s the religion of Jesus Christ, the religion of love through the cross. He died and so must we.
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In our Gospel, Jesus says, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” The “set” is more like “throw.” The image is something like fire and brimstone, or shooting lightning bolts. Some translations say, “how I wish it were already kindled,” making us think of starting our fire small and gentle—but our translation rightly shows the violence of Jesus’s language: he’s not gently warming our hearts, he is crashing in, kicking down the walls.
Then, “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished.” Jesus uses lots of mixed metaphors. Notice how he’s shifted from fire to the water of baptism. (Baptism literally means dunked in water.) It seems to me he shifts metaphors partly to keep us from getting too attached to any one of them.
But notice too that he has shifted persons. He wants to cast fire on the earth, on us. But he wants to be plunged into the waters himself. That’s his love: He leads the way, “the leader and perfecter of faith,” as our reading from Hebrews says. And that is the meaning of our baptism: we are violently plunged into the cross of Christ, the radical call of conversion—and so the waters cast fire on us. This is not the religion of a comfortable bath, it is the religion of the radical cross.
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And then the household. There are five characters here, father, mother, adult son, daughter, and the son’s wife, a pretty picture—but “a household of five will be divided.” He says, look, the religion of love is going to be hard; it will not make cozy happy homes; it will set us at odds with a fallen world. That’s ironic—as ironic as the fire and water he has just discussed.
But that’s the cross. That’s setting our face toward Jerusalem, which is both the place of communion and the place of the cross. Of course he has “come to establish peace”—but not “on the earth.” It’s a hard peace, the peace of radical love.
Where do you use God’s love as an excuse to avoid conversion?
But it’s almost funny how that hurrah clashes with what usually follows: because almost always, the Gospel punches us in the nose. Those who haven’t read the Gospel think it’s full of Jesus telling us how nice he is and how much he likes us just as we are. But open the Gospel and read it, and you feel yourself almost under seige.
Jesus is fire. “The chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” John the Baptist baptizes with water: for all his terrifying austerity, he can only rinse off the outside. But fire purifies all the way through.
“What should we do?” “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none”: pretty reasonable, actually. Jesus, who is fire, not water, will go much further, and tell us to give our tunic to the one who takes our cloak (Lk 6:29) and, “Sell all you have and give to the poor” (Lk 18:22).
After a first Sunday that looked forward to the final coming of Christ, our second Sunday of Advent introduces John the Baptist, calling us to “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths,” and clarifying that the real preparation is “repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” which is the true meaning of baptism.
To say “Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea” is to say that Jerusalem is occupied by pagans, by the rulers of this world.
And into this morass comes John: “The word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.”
Our Psalm again cites the 
Our Gospel, in the new year of Luke, warns of final tribulations; we’re reading the parallel to the passage we read two weeks ago, from Mark. “People will die of fright in anticipation. . . . The powers of the heavens will be shaken. And they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”
If you go to daily Mass, you heard this whole apocalyptic chapter of Luke last week. Just before our Sunday Gospel we hear about the destruction of Jerusalem: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it.”
No, the miracle is not destruction, the miracle is healing. Our reading from Jeremiah might be more helpful in that regard.
And how can we get ready for his return in power? By entering into his first coming, in humility. “We earnestly ask and exhort you in the Lord Jesus . . . . You know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.”
We start with the famous “Son of Man” prophecy, the first vision of Daniel, when the visions begin in Daniel 7. “I saw one like a Son of man coming, on the clouds of heaven.” Jesus calls himself “the son of man,” and people make the connection.
Before Pilate, Jesus is almost evasive about kingship. Pilate, the governor, rules on behalf of Caesar, the ultimate earthly king (who is in his own way called son of God and most high, etc.), and somehow cooperates with the local client king Herod. Pilate knows—or thinks he knows—what kingship means.
So too, “I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” But Pilate says, “What is truth?”
final appearances always involve “the clouds.”) “And every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. All the peoples of the earth will lament him. Yes. Amen.”
Here’s an important point in Catholic theology. Protestants (and some Catholics) have a tendency to read the Bible as talking about other times. For them, the most important part about Genesis is figuring out when and how the world was created back then; the most important part of the Apocalypse is figuring out when and how it will happen; even the most important part of Christ’s work on the cross is what happened then.
Our reading from Hebrews says Jesus made the “one sacrifice for sins, and took his seat forever at the right hand of God; now he waits until his enemies are made his footstool.” We await that final victory too—and live in the in-between time, when we know Jesus will triumph but we have not experienced it yet.
Our reading from Hebrews takes us into the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The priest of the Old Testament could offer only a “blood that is not his own.” To sacrifice something other than ourselves has no power to overcome our sins or to establish our relationship with God. But like the widow, the sacrifice Jesus offers is his own life. That is the only true and sufficient sacrifice.
And this week, he condemns the scribes. He says they “like to go around in long robes (in Greek, stoles) and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets.” Sound like anyone you know?
The “widow” puts a point on it. It’s still self-serving if you’re getting your steaks and movies from Carmela Soprano, who has plenty of money. But the widow brings out the pure selfishness of the scribe who claims to be pious and eats away her livelihood.
Jesus is affirming the Old Testament. Here, at the culmination of his teaching, in answer to the most basic, ultimate question, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, the culmination of the five books of Moses. First he quotes the Sh’ma, the most fundamental Jewish prayer: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Lord alone.” “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is not as obviously central, but it is a quotation from Leviticus (19:18), and it does indeed summarize much of the Old Law, the two poles of which are worship of God and love of neighbor, especially the poor neighbor, the one most in need of our mercy.
In the stories the Lectionary skipped over, since Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he has “disputed” about the cleansing of the temple (which Mark “sandwiches” with the strange story of the cursed fig tree), Jesus’ authority and the authority of John, the parable of the tenants who do not pay their master, paying taxes to Caesar, and the reality of the resurrection.
And so in the other direction, our reading ends, “And no one dared to ask him any more questions.” In fact, they don’t. In the rest of Mark’s Gospel, the only question about doctrine that remains is when the disciples ask, “When will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished?” We have reached the culmination of Jesus’ teaching.
Our reading from Hebrews shows how that teaching culminates in the death of Christ. Hebrews is a complicated meditation on various Old Testament passages; this week’s reading, for example, ends with “the word of the oath,” because it is meditating on the profundity of Psalm 110’s saying, “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.’” For the Lord to “swear” suggests there’s something important about this priestly order of Melchizedek, something greater and more fundamental than the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament.