Jesus’ disciples are angry that a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus (and them). So, James and John ask Jesus if he wants them to call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans.
Luke 9:51–56. “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they journeyed to another village.
They’re echoing the incident of Elijah on Mt. Carmel when the prophet called down fire from heaven in a showdown with the prophets of Baal (1Kings 18).
(An aside: This could be where James and John received the nickname “Sons of Thunder.”)
In Elijah’s incident, fire came down from heaven and consumed the waterlogged sacrifice, thereby proving who Israel’s true God was. Afterwards, the prophet set out on a holy war and killed 450 prophets of Baal. Very bloody.
Jesus and the disciples are near the area of Elijah’s showdown, and they believe they’re following his prophetic example. They apparently thought something like, “If the people who rejected Elijah were slaughtered, how much more should it happen to the people who reject the Son of God.”
Maybe they assumed this was an act of faith. After all, who can call down fire from heaven? Who would even dare to suggest such a thing? It’s impossible. Go try it sometime. Yell at the sky and order a lightning strike. See what happens.
However, Jesus rebukes them. Some translations include the sobering admonition, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of.”
Jesus is not Zeus. He doesn’t hurl thunderbolts. Jesus is not about killing, violence, and feeling slighted because people do not welcome him. He’s not interested in destroying those who do not express their faith in him. Some translations of Luke 9:56 say, “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”
There’s may be no more urgent message than this for us and our age. So many Christians feel a sense of outrage that society is not welcoming what they believe to be the teachings of Jesus, so they get angry and do everything they can to force society to implement laws to force others to follow their beliefs.
You can detect the fear people have about society moving away from “traditional values.” To prevent that from happening, many Christians are doing their own version of calling down fire from heaven.
We’ve witnessed it with our own eyes. Heard it with our own ears. Listen to the rhetoric, the anger, the vitriol.
This is not a matter of simply participating in the democratic process. Democracy is a way for everyone to have a voice. We’re witnessing something different. It’s the use of violence and the rhetoric of violence in a Nietzschean will-to-power.
It happens when the Church turns into little more than a political lobbying organization. It occurs when using the ambo to guilt people into voting a certain way — which is far different than aiding people in forming their consciences. We see it when the Church uses the donations of the faithful to fund political campaigns.
The Catholic Integralist movement is a visible expression of this anger, anxiety, and will-to-power. Wed the Church to the civil authorities, the theory goes, and then we’ll finally have people doing what “we” want. Today’s Gospel rejects that approach entirely. Jesus rebukes that version of his work and message.
When we behave this way, Jesus turns and rebukes us for embracing Christian Nietzschean ethics. Then he journeys to another village.
Today’s Gospel is a call to repentance. We are to repent of using our faith as a too to leverage social, political, and cultural authority.
We — not “they” — are to repent of our feelings of religious and moral superiority. We are to repent of feeling sighted when people don’t share our beliefs and way of life.
Today’s Gospel is also a call to reinterpret the incident of Elijah on Mt. Carmel. What needs to be consumed is not people. Jesus is the sacrifice that is fully consumed, and our sinful desires are eventually slain by the sword of the Spirit. God’s sword, not ours. A spiritual sword, not a literal one. “The word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It cuts all the way through, to where soul and spirit meet, to where joints and marrow come together. It judges the desires and thoughts of the heart’ (Hebrews 4:12).
The disciples eventually got the message. St. John transformed from being a Son of Thunder into being the Beloved Disciple who wrote the famous words, “God is love.” May today’s Gospel help us rethink who Jesus is, how he always acts, and how he wants us to behave in his name.
