Lectionary Reflection for Proper 15C on Luke 12:49-56

THE ANCIENT ART OF DENIAL

“I’ve made up my mind. Don’t confuse me with the facts!”

The first time I encountered these words was on a bumper sticker, and even though I’ve never actually heard anyone seriously utter these words out loud, I nodded my head in recognition. While I don’t like to admit it, I have to acknowledge that there are times when I am so convinced of my perspective that it takes a lot to get me to change my mind. But I also know the struggle of trying to convince others to consider new ideas when they have no interest in doing so. No matter what issue we may be dealing with, we seldom have to look far to find people—and sometimes we are those people—who will quote the Bible or find a scientist to support their view, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.

For example, on Tuesday, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has cancelled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines. In a video he posted on social media, he claimed that, “As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract“.¹ But as Stephen Colbert pointed out on The Late Show, the National Institute of Health estimated that they prevented 14.4 million deaths.²

While in some cases, such denial may provide some immediate comfort, it generally keeps us from facing tough realities and seeking solutions. Or it hides important truths from us and leaves us feeling confident in our ignorance and delusion. Denial almost always makes things worse.

Jesus’ words in this week’s Lectionary Gospel reading reveal that denial is not a new problem. The world in which Jesus preached was in crisis. A fragile stability had been achieved in Israel, but it was not going to last long. There was growing discontent over Rome’s oppressive rulership of the Holy Land, and revolution was in the air.³ As John’s Gospel shows, one of the primary reasons that the religious leaders decided to have Jesus executed was because, in their thinking, it was better to kill one revolutionary than plunge the entire nation into a revolutionary war which would certainly be won by the Roman army (John 11:49). Ultimately, their plan didn’t work. Jerusalem was sacked and the temple destroyed just a few decades later. But at the time Jesus was preaching, the average person in the crowd, it seems, found it far easier to practice the ancient art of denial and believe that, somehow, God would make everything better.⁴

Jesus knew that this strategy was doomed to fail, and the urgency he felt to get people to hear his message was growing. He had set his sights on Jerusalem, and so he knew his time was limited—the baptism of suffering he was dreading (12:50; cf. Mark 10:38) was not far off.⁵ From the start of Chapter 12, Jesus had been calling the people to avoid the ways (the yeast) of the religious leaders (12:1), to fear God and not humans (12:4-5), to seek first God’s reign (12:31), to be alert (12:38), and to live with urgency the priorities and values of God’s reign (12:35). But increasingly, he could not contain his passion and so now, in the pericope for Proper 15C, he declared that he had come to “cast fire upon the earth”, and that he wished the fire was already burning at full force (Luke 12:49).

The fire Christ was to bring had been prophesied by John the Baptiser in Luke 3:16-17. It was the Spirit’s work of sifting society and burning away what had no value (Malachi 3:1-3). It was the mission of Isaiah’s Servant of God which Jesus had claimed as his own in Luke 4:18-21. It was the fire of justice that, Jesus hoped, would ignite the hearts of his followers and empower them to embody God’s reign and make it visible in their society. As Matt Skinner puts it:

The fire Jesus wants to kindle is a fire of change, the fire of God’s active presence in the world. No wonder he is so eager to strike the match.⁶

The reign of God which Jesus proclaimed was more than a way to get to heaven after death. It called the people to an alternative way of being—in contrast to the strategies of violent revolution, self-protective collaboration with the empire, escape into protected communities, or simple denial. Jesus knew that if the people didn’t respond to God’s invitation to build a new society,⁷ they would ultimately lose everything. But the crowds weren’t listening. And so he confronted his listeners with two difficult, but unavoidable, truths.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

The first—although it appears second in the Gospel narrative—was that the coming revolution, with its consequences, was closer and more certain than anyone was willing to admit. The people, who were good at predicting the weather from the signs of the natural world around them, were very bad—deliberately so, it seems—at predicting the social and political climate of their world. That’s why Jesus called them hypocrites—literally “play-actors”. It’s not that they could not see what was going on. It’s that they chose not to see; they refused to acknowledge the truth because it would require more from them than they were willing to give. As Tom Wright describes it:

Jesus, then, sees the crisis coming, a crisis of which his own fate will be the central feature (the ‘baptism’ which he must still undergo); and he is astonished and dismayed that so few of his contemporaries can see it at all. They are good at local weather-forecasts: clouds rolling in from the Mediterranean mean rain, and a wind from the hot and dusty Negev means sultry weather. So why can’t they look at what’s going on all around them, from the Roman occupation to the oppressive regime of Herod, from the wealthy and arrogant high priests in Jerusalem to the false agendas of the Pharisees—and, in the middle of it all, a young prophet announcing God’s kingdom and healing the sick? Why can’t they put two and two together, and realize that this is the moment all Israel’s history has been waiting for? Why can’t they see that the crisis is coming?⁸