The Fire of Love Christ Came into the World to Set, 29th Thursday (II), October 25, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of Charity
October 25, 2018
Eph 3:14-21, Ps 33, Lk 12:49-53

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the first reading, St. Paul prostrates himself before God the Father in prayer begging him to grant the Christians in Ephesus and us to send the Holy Spirit to strengthen us in our inner self — strengthen us in mind, will and conscience — to help us allow Christ his Son to dwell in our hearts, and, rooted in love, to have the courage to understand “the breadth and length and height and depth [of] the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and “be filled with all the fullness of God.” Several early saints interpreted the breath, length, height and depth as the dimensions of the Cross, which is fundamentally not a sign of pain but of the unbelievable love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that bore that pain for love of us. St. Paul was praying to the Father to raise us as his children by the Holy Spirit to be strengthened by the Cross, to allow Christ his Son to abide in us and to help us to understand that cruciform dimensions of the Christian life so as to open ourselves to the fullness of the God of love. It’s an extraordinary prayer, beginning for a fullness St. Paul himself had already tasted when he himself admitted he had been crucified with Christ and the life he was living in the flesh he was living by faith in the Son of God who loved him and died for him, a fullness he called “God’s power and wisdom.”
• That prayer for us to be filled with the fullness of the love of Christ is an echo of the prayer Jesus makes in the Gospel, when he speaks about the fire he had come to earth to ignite, and links that to “the baptism with which [he] must be baptized,” which is the baptism of blood on the Cross. He said he was in “anguish” until that baptism be accomplished and the fire begin blazing. His love on the Cross is meant to be a fire of love that is meant to light the world ablaze, the type of love that will transform and strengthen us within. It’s a living flame that will eventually unite — as a flame does all that it consumes— all people in the love of the Father who sent his Son to form a loving family. That union will happen only when people allow themselves to be “burned” and “transformed” by Christ’s love. Many are afraid of the fire, afraid of zeal. That’s why Jesus says that he has come not to “bring peace but division,” because he and the fire of his love would be a sign of contradiction dividing even family members. This is not because Christ is a divider. He is the Prince of Peace who told us during the first Mass that he was leaving us and giving us peace. But when someone in a family opts for Christ, others who want to be first get jealous and angry, and that’s what divides. Sin divides. The fire of Christ’s love is opposed by the coldness of a heart that doesn’t love God and others. Dante depicts Hell not as fire — based on the “fire of Gehenna,” the valley where trash was burned — but as ice-cold. The division that flows from opposition to Christ and the fire of his love was true in the early Church. Often when Jews converted to Christianity, they were disowned by their family. Still today when a Muslim converts to Christianity in Pakistan and various other fundamentalist Muslim countries, or a Hindu converts in certain fundamentalist areas in India, a contract is put out on them, and most often by the members of his or her own family. There are those who find the all-consuming fire of Christ’s love a threat and the sinful reaction to other’s coming alive in love does divide. But the love of Christ burning in the family is able to forgive and to heal, so that all members of the family, God-willing, will grow stronger in faith, allow Christ to remain in their home, and come to the celestial home of the Father from whom every family on earth takes its name.
• We receive Christ’s holy fire each Mass, as Christ seeks to make our hearts burn and, as St. Ephrem used to proclaim in the early Church, when we consume the host we’re consuming “Spirit and Fire.” In the Eucharist, we enter into Christ’s passion, and Christ seeks to strengthen us, and comes to remain in us, so that we may experience in this world a little of the fullness with which he wishes to fill us forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: