The Fire of God
One
The Character of Fire
Fire is one of the scariest of all natural phenomena. Whether you watch reports of forest fires in California or you see black smoke billowing up from somewhere in your neighborhood and hear the sirens of the fire trucks as they race towards the source. Fire is scary. Once it gets going, it doesn’t let up. It’s insatiable, it consumes everything, spreads everywhere, starts from a spark, and diffuses itself like it’s governed by an exponentially increasing algorithm.
And yet, this is exactly what Christ said He wanted to do. He said He wanted to start a fire. In the Gospel of Luke, He says, “I have come to start a fire on this earth; and how much I long for it to be kindled!”
What did He mean?
Two
God as the All-Consuming Fire
We have said that Fire is all-consuming and relentless in its movement. Fire has a kind of restless, inner dynamism, an energy that comes from inside itself. Fire, like heat, is movement. And this is God Himself. He is pure energy, pure act. He Burns with Power
When Isaiah saw the Lord, God was adored by the burning Seraphim, who tended the hot coals at God’s altar. God is the heat of pure love and pure power, which in God are the same thing, and just as His power stretches everywhere, so does His love.
Just as fire wishes to spread itself to everything, so does God. Whenever there is a selfish idol, God’s love seeks to overpower it, to consume it with love. Moses tells the Israelites, “The Lord Thy God is a consuming fire – a jealous God” (Deut 4:23-24)
He’s not jealous for His sake, He’s jealous for our sakes. He hates to see us shivering and alone, with our little stone idolatries of cold money, boring sex, and tired ambition. He will send us the fire of His love until we have come alive with His life, until we burn and are warmed with His love.
And that is why He has sent us His Son.
Three
Christ as Fire
Christ is the divine fire in human form. He is the spark of divine flame that God has sent to heat and light a cold, dark world.
Do you remember after Christ had risen from the dead, and had walked with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus? They didn’t recognize Him, something about His appearance was different. But do you remember what they said to themselves after he had revealed Himself in the breaking of the bread? They realized that they should have recognized Him, not because of how He looked, but because of the effect He had on them. They said, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” (Lk 24:32).
That’s the effect the Lord had. He filled the heart with warmth, with fire. He made your heart burn. Because He was the vessel of divine fire. And for our sakes, He offered His life, like a burnt offering of old.
The English Martyr, St. Robert Southwell, wrote a poem where Jesus explains Christ’s sacrificial fire of love:
Jesus says, “My faultless breast the furnace is
The fuel, wounding thorns
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke
The ashes: shames and scorns
The fuel Justice layeth on,
And Mercy blows the coals
The metal in this furnace wrought
Are men’s defiled souls”
Fire doesn’t just heat, light, or spread. It purifies. The suffering fire that burned Christ up on Calvary made the purification and the enkindling of the human race possible on Pentecost.
Four
Church as Fire
When the Holy Spirit descended upon Mary in Nazareth, He lit the fire of Christ in the world. When the Holy Spirit descended upon Mary and the apostles in the upper room, it was in the form of fire so that the fire of the Church could blaze throughout the world.
Ever since then, the blessed conflagration that is the Church has been a wildfire across space and time. It never goes out. Caesars, kings, and Communists have tried to extinguish it, but it only flares up again more aggressively.
Just when it seems to be dwindling in the West, it breaks out again in Africa or East Asia.
The fire of the Church, the fire lit at Calvary and set loose across the globe at Pentecost, that fire has only grown. The number of souls who count themselves Catholic has only ever grown since it first broke the bounds of Jerusalem.
And now we are the tenders, the bearers of that fire. What shall we do with that flame? What shall we do to make it grow brighter, hotter, and across more of God’s earth?
Five
Us as Fire Set on Fire by the Eucharist
If we bear the fire of Christ by Our Faith, then woe to us if that fire grows cold, or dim, or is kept to ourselves.
We are to be on fire, to have the character of fire. We should be able to shed light, so we need to know our faith. We should be able to give warmth, so we’d better have charity. And we should be contagious, so we have to spread the faith.
But to do that, we need to constantly be relit from the fire that started it all, the divine fire who has come to Earth.
When we receive the Eucharist, let’s ask for the energy of heat, which is heat, after all, because it moves.
In 1826, a young laywoman named Pauline Jaricot began to gather people in groups of fifteen to pray the Rosary. Her method was simple: invite people to come together and pray the Rosary and give them something to think or meditate upon while they pray. They called it “The Living Rosary.”
After just five years it spread to every country in Europe. And within eight years there were one million members. And that was with no social media.
Pauline wrote, “The rosary groups should invite anyone, the good, the mediocre, and others who had nothing to offer but their goodwill. Fifteen pieces of coal, one is well lit, there are four or five that are half-lit, and the rest not lit at all. Put the fifteen together and you have a blazing fire.”
Then we will be rekindled by Christ and His Spirit, and the words of the book of Wisdom will be fulfilled in us, “The just shall shine, and shall run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.” (Wisdom 3:7).