Dear Brothers and Sisters,
This Word can be confusing. Jesus brings peace, joy and communion, but today we hear the opposite. This is not a parable so there is no need to figure it out. We see in the world that there is a great division among all kinds of people: those who believe and those who do not believe, between those who follow Trump and those who follow Biden, those who are rich and those who are poor, those who are born here and those who are immigrants, the blacks from the whites, and the brown from the yellow, those who are old and those who are young, environmentalists and those who are not, those who follow Real Madrid and those follow Barcelona, and those who follow the Yankees, we pray for you!
The Lord did not come to make the world this way. The daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law always hate one another. It would cost them a huge amount if they were to love each other. Fathers fight with their sons and moms with their daughters, who often take away the affection of the husband. These are generalizations and may not be true if your case, but you will have other ones for sure. In life there is always this tension. I fight with you, and you fight with me; these conflicts are natural, but if we have some faith this is not the way it is supposed to be. The division the Lord brings about is not like this. Jesus brings war, yes, but in that kind of war, Christ let’s himself be killed. The Lord does not send us to fight. He sends us to the war so we can allow ourselves to be killed.
Christ sends us to this war so we can allow ourselves to be killed, but we are too afraid to go. Jesus Christ came to bring war, persecution and division. He does not send us to fight; he sends us into the battle so we can allow ourselves to be killed. Jesus Christ said I came to bring war, persecution and division. Jesus said, “I will send you out like lambs amidst wolves.” They will slap you on the one cheek and a Christian turns the other one. There will be persecution.
We see this in the first reading. The prophet Jeremiah is thrown into the cistern because the people didn’t like his message of surrendering to the enemy. They said this man must be put to death and they threw him into a cistern without any water or food. Ebed-melech, a Cushite, a foreigner who was the only one who stood up for him and the king ordered to save his life. Jeremiah said in his ‘confessions’ , “You have seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced; you overpowered me, and I am the laughing-stock of the others…God’s word has been the cause of insult and derision…I said to myself, I will not speak in his name, but there is a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones.” He did not cease to announce what God had told him.
A Christian does not return evil for evil. The fight between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law ends when one of them allows herself to be killed by the other. She takes the evil on himself and carries it. A Christian is called to carry the sins of the other, as Christ has done for us. He carried our sins and nailed them to the cross. In the second reading it says, through these sufferings we are made perfect. But perfect does not mean sinless or pure. The Greek word ‘telos’ means to reach the end or goal that God created us to be. Ask for the grace not to be afraid and whatever the world sends us.
What has Christ done who is the perfectly innocent one? The innocent one without sin takes on the injustice and is silent as a lamb led to the slaughter. He allowed injustice to kill him. Jesus compares this to Baptism. He said, “I have come to set fire on the earth…but there is a baptism with which I must be baptized.” The Lord has a great desire for you and me to become Christian, a little lamb. He must suffer it first in order to inflame our hearts to do the same. How great is his anguish until this is accomplished in you and me.
The world has a totally different mentality. The world teaches us to fight, to struggle for justice and make everything correct. Those who commit injustices must be removed from society. Alarms go off when someone breaks into the building, go after them, beat them up and cut off their hands. Why do we do this because inside of us we all have a Barabbas who was a guerrilla fighter who also divided the people. He professed that the evil of the Roman empire had to be extinguished. He was jailed for killing someone who did an injustice. We are have a terrorist inside of us who wants to impose his will.
Perhaps the terrorist inside of us is usually quiet but in the parking lot or on the highway he appears. He comes out when your spouse gives you a dirty look or dinner is not ready or the meat is burned or the house is messy, then the alarm sounds, and out comes the guerrilla to give the other a good thrashing. He appears when someone takes what is yours. It ought to be that you cannot steal from a true Christian. He will always say: “Keep it, you must need it more than me.”
This is the war that surrounds us, don’t be afraid to enter it by putting down your weapon. If one is humble, the devil leaves. When a Christian lets himself be killed, the war is over; evil is destroyed. Where there is a Christian evil in the world stops.