Jesus said to his disciples:
"I have come to set the earth on fire,
and how I wish it were already blazing!
Prophets have never been terribly popular. Prophets have the uncanny knack of sticking their noses in places where a lot of people would rather not have them. Prophets often tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear. Prophets confront the status quo and challenge us to uncomfortably listen to our ‘better angels.’
No wonder that prophets down through the centuries gained the popular epithet from their listeners to resoundingly ‘shut up!’ Jeremiah suffered that classical response of so many prophets when he was literally thrown into a pit. His message from the Lord was just too much for his audience to bear. ‘Shut up!’
Sisters and brothers, the great cloud of witnesses that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of those great prophetic voices of God’s good news down through the centuries, often suffered the same fate, literally or metaphorically, that Jeremiah endured. These men and women were afire with a passion for speaking the truth of the Gospel. They wanted to emulate Jesus and set the world on fire with his liberating message of the Father’s unconditional love for all humanity, empathy for the human condition, life-renewing compassion and forgiveness.
Friends, if there ever was a time when this prophetic message is needed, it is, indeed, the present moment in which we live. Our world is torn apart by a divisiveness that is rooted in a ‘me first’ mentality that is the absolute antithesis of the Gospel ethic of Jesus. We have world leaders, narcissistically concerned about ‘what’s in it for me?’ where the perennial values that have traditionally made our country ‘good and great’ are traded for a transactional ethic that is devoid of goodness.
The common good has been traded for a victimizing and demonizing of those who do not agree with us, the marginalized are viewed as an inconvenient drain on society and immigrants are all painted with the same insidious broad-brush strokes of thugs, parasites, rapists, murders and drug crazed addicts.
We desperately need that fire on the earth that Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel. A purifying fire that renews in our hearts the very essence of Gospel truth. A fire that will refine our hearts with a renewed compassion for the dignity of all God’s people. All of us are pilgrims and immigrants longing for our true homeland where God’s unfailing mercy and unconditional love are the hallmarks.