Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth?
“Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division...”
In the Gospel today, Jesus says He came to bring fire to the earth and that He wishes it were already burning.
And isn’t this a topic for our day: division vs. unity? I long for unity. But at the same time, I feel this deep fire to call out the things that are hurting the Church. The poor catechesis, the confusion in its teaching, and the compromises that lead people away from the truth.
In my younger years, I was very bold and wouldn’t hesitate. In many ways that is admirable and not a fault. Yet as I’ve aged, I see one reason to take pause, at least for a moment before we speak out.
We are constantly confronted with issues where criticism is necessary. But before we speak, we should confront ourselves with one question:
What does my own prayer life look like?
Consider our interior disposition. Are we speaking from God’s grace or from pride? From zeal for truth or from anger or fear?
The fire Jesus talks about isn’t meant to destroy; it’s meant to purify. It burns away the ways we’ve made peace with sin.
If what we speak isn’t produced from an overflowing abundance of grace spilling out from our hearts, or comes from a heart that still grants quarter to our own sins, then we are at great risk of spreading a fire that destroys rather than purifies.
The fire that Jesus wants to kindle has to start in us first. We all wish the Church, or its people, were already ablaze so we could draw warmth from them. But that may be the problem.
The blaze begins in us when we let God fill us with His fire and allow Him to purify our own hearts first. That is the source of a fire that heals and spreads in the world around us.
If we’re not cultivating that within our own soul, then we are at least partly responsible for the lack of that blaze we desire in the world.