A sign of contradiction

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 12:49-53) finds Jesus in one of His most contrary moods. This is the Jesus who turns over the table of the moneychangers. It is the Jesus who berates the Pharisees for their hypocrisies. It is the Jesus who simply refuses to open His mouth in the presence of Herod whom He calls at one point a ‘vixen’ (Luke 13:32); most English translations have it as ‘fox’ but the Greek indicates a female fox.  

Yet why does He do this? Is He not the bringer of peace? Does He not come to restore order, rather than to upset it? Does He not urge His disciples to unity and love? Where comes this taste for upsetting the apple cart or for flinging a bomb of controversy among the polite and well-respected denizens of Palestine?

Perhaps He does this for one reason only: that only in God are truth and unity mirror images of each other (along with goodness and beauty). In everything else, multiplicity is the order of the day, and in fallen humanity, multiplicity will also involve adversity and enmity: enmity towards each other and enmity towards God.

But evil has developed strategies to counter the bad press that comes from its divisions, and the chief of these is that all evil copies God. Some saints refer to the devil even as the ape of God. Moreover, evil can only be chosen under the appearance of good.

And this is why we must be cautious, not to say suspicious, of all attempts to call evil good and good evil; of all attempts to make us swallow a lie in the name of a truth. We are living in such an atmosphere right now in which assisted suicide is renamed ‘assisted dying’ and murder is rebranded ‘a woman’s right to choose’. Yet the relabelling can be even more deceptive still. Any call for unity which sacrifices truth smacks of a compromise from the devil’s own playbook. Sticking together even at the cost of truth and goodness is not a Christian instinct; it is a demonic strategy, for as I said, only in God are truth, goodness, and beauty the mirror images of unity.

Jesus’ solution for this dilemma is to be the sign of contradiction, as Simeon prophesied (Luke 2:34), to cast fire upon the earth. His fire is not the kind which destroys unless it is destroying sin. It produces not the kind of smoke which blinds unless to confound the minds of God’s enemies. Rather, it is a fire which warms, consoles and, yes, purifies: Our God is a consuming fire, as St Paul writes to the Hebrews. Its smoke does not choke us but cures and preserves the good in us, giving us the evangelical umami taste of the salt of the earth.

Yet the cost of this can be quite high: Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you but rather division, says Jesus. Why is this? It is because division already exists and arises from sin, from revolt against God. The world, shaped by original sin, is pulling away from God. Jesus’ salvific mission is to counteract this gravitational thrust towards hell, to bring humanity back within the orbit of heaven. And thus, from now on a household of five will be divided: three against two and two against three. It is not that Jesus wants the division; it is rather that He knows the cost of reconciliation. He knows that, in the end, unity must be governed by truth and follow the path of God’s order; not the deceitful order that our wayward hearts want to impose on our lives.

It is easy to call evil good; we do it every day when we sin. It is much more sinister to call good evil; God preserve us from such falls. But only God is goodness right through, as St Thomas More tells us in A Man for All Seasons. And this is why he will not bend to the will of Henry VIII over his fake marriage; this is why he goes to his death, even at the cost of seeming to be a traitor to his beloved king; even at the cost of hurting his precious family – parting from them not forever but only for a time. For God alone is goodness, truth, beauty, and unity bound together. He is our salvation and our fulfilment, the fulfilment of all our desire.

Herod the Great had been afraid that this new king of the Jews would take his tinsel crown; had he but known that Jesus wanted to give him a crown of eternal bliss, he might not have destroyed the flower of a generation of Bethlehem’s children. What evil we can do under the appearance of good! Let us have the courage to choose the peace that Jesus offers, the true peace of God, even when it is a sign of contradiction in this wayward world.