Yeshua the Fire Thrower

“‘I have come to set the world on fire and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished. Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other! From now on families will be split apart, three in favour of me and two against; or two in favour and three against. Father will be divided against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother; and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’ Then Jesus turned to the crowd and said, ‘when you see clouds beginning to form in the west, you say, here comes a shower. And you are right. When the south wind blows, you say, today will be a scorcher. And it is. You fools! You know how to interpret the weather signs of the earth and sky, but you don’t know how to interpret the present times.’” (Luke 12:49-56) (Also read Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19; Hebrews 11:29-12:2) I suspect that if you asked people who said, “I came to bring fire to the earth,” few who were not professional teachers of the New Testament would guess “Yeshua.” It just doesn’t sound like Him, does it? “Blessed are the peacemakers”; yes, He said that. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”; yep, sounds like Yeshua. But, Yeshua as an arsonist?? Or as Prometheus, giving fire to humanity and getting into terrible trouble for it? Or as an agitator, a troublemaker, stirring things up?

I.) Sometimes you need an agitator. That last part; Yeshua the agitator; is how He explains the image. He came to set people at odds with each other He says, to divide households, father against son and daughter against mother. Yeshua is the divider: the sharp knife of decision and commitment that splits people up based on how they line up with Him or against Him. He’s a Lightning Rod; He not only brings fire to the earth but also takes fire from others who hate Him and what He has done to the minds of their friends and family. Yeshua compares His work to baptism; please pardon my Baptist assumptions, but the image works better if we imagine total immersion. He has a job to do He says and the only way for Him to do it is all out, full bore, no holds barred, pedal to the floor. There’s going to be an almighty explosion He says and He’d just as soon go ahead and have done with it, because it won’t be much fun getting through it.

II.) What Luke’s agitators look like. The original firebrand in Luke is John the Baptist. Speaking to the crowds who hiked out to the Judean wilderness and who camped out to listen to him preach and to be baptized, he told them that judgment was imminent; the axe was already chopping at the roots of the trees and pretty soon the trees not bearing fruit were going to be cut down and thrown into the fire. “What must we do?” asked the crowds. “Give away your surplus to those who have none,” he said. If you are storing up the world’s goods, then you are not a fruitful tree. You must be rich toward YAHVEH, putting your stuff where YAHVEH’s heart is, with the poor or you’ll face the fires of YAHVEH’s wrath. John’s message echoes the preaching of Old Testament prophets like Amos and Isaiah. You hear echoes of John in Yeshua’s preaching in Luke, when He tells His followers to sell their possessions to feed the poor. Yeshua’s followers lived by these precepts when they left everything behind to go out on mission for Him and later when they structured their common life in Jerusalem so that nobody ever went hungry or lacked a place to live. True, it was a message of fire and judgment, one that continues to make those of us who have more than we need profoundly uncomfortable. But although the Agitator’s message stirred things up and upset families and communities, it also created life and community.
Yeshua sent out other fire-throwers in Luke. He sends the Twelve out in chapter 9 and then in chapter 10 sends seventy more, instructing them to heal the sick, cast out demons and tell everybody that YAHVEH’s Kingdom had come near. You’ll be lightning rods, He says; some people will appreciate what you say and happily take you in and feed you. In other places, you won’t get the time of day; your message will fall on deaf ears. Don’t worry about it. Walk out into their streets and shake off the dust from your feet and say, “We’re leaving your dirt here as a witness that we were here and that you didn’t care, but no matter what you think of it, YAHVEH’s Kingdom will come; you’ve been warned!” Notice a distinction here: the followers of Yeshua are fire-throwers, but only in the sense that their words and deeds make plain the choice that people have to obey YAHVEH or not. It isn’t your job said Yeshua, to curse those who won’t listen to you or to call down fire from heaven on them. Your job is to make the truth plain and if they won’t listen, make that plain too. The number one commotion-starter in Luke is of course, Yeshua Himself. He’s an equal-opportunity pest. Like John, He tells the rich that they must give away their stuff to the poor, but then He’s not very sympathetic to the ordinary man who wants his fair share of an inheritance. He eats with the sinners and that makes the pious uncomfortable, but then He eats with the pious, too. He fusses at Simon the Pharisee for not providing water so he could wash up before dinner, but then shows up unwashed for dinner at a second Pharisee’s house. Yeshua is clever; He has the knack for spotting the places in our lives that are not under YAHVEH’s control and then spotlighting them.

III.) We must cooperate. Use whatever metaphor you like: a garden overgrown with weeds, a house with dark corners full of piled-up junk and cobwebs, a half-dead tree badly in need of pruning if it is ever to be fruitful. Whatever image we choose, the work involved in putting things back to rights is substantial and the longer you put it off, the harder the task may become. But then add in another layer of complexity; the house and the garden and the tree are not passive, but active; they can resist cleaning and weeding and pruning or they can participate. The Agitator’s task is to try to convince them that something must be done and done soon, but the Agitator won’t be able to make all the changes. If we are the garden overgrown by the weeds of materialism, the Agitator can warn us about where we’re headed, but we must assist in uprooting what threatens to choke out our faith. If we are the house where racism and sexism have created impenetrable barriers against some, the Agitator can shine the light on the junk that blocks access to all; but the long, hard work of clearing and moving and rearranging will fall to us. If we are the tree whose living branches bear little fruit because so much energy is used on holding up dead and useless branches, the Agitator can make us aware of the problem. But we can resist efforts to prune away what fails to produce life and fruit; unless we’re willing to participate, the result can be division and conflict. Two questions, two exhortations: today there are pushy, noisy, fire-throwing advocates for change trying to gain a hearing with us. To which ones are we listening? Let us resolve to cooperate better, so that change is not so slow in coming. To which ones have we shut our ears? Let us rethink that stance, knowing that our natural inclination is to resist anything that makes us uncomfortable. Yeshua was a Fire-Thrower; might they speak with His voice? Maybe, maybe not, but we’ll never know until we openly and honestly consider their critique and we can’t do that with our fingers in our ears!!