Casting Fire on Earth
Casting Fire on Earth
`I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!' (Luke 12:49)
This saying is hard in the sense of being difficult to understand, mainly because it is not obviously related to the context in which it appears. It may be thought probable that it is somehow connected with the saying immediately following (see p. 125), about the baptism which Jesus had to undergo before current restraints were removed, but this cannot be taken for granted: each of the two sayings must first be examined by itself.
It is natural to link the `fire' in this saying with the `fire' mentioned in John the Baptist's description of the work to be accomplished by the one whose way he was preparing: `He who is mightier than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire' (Luke 3:16). The fire is closely associated here with the Holy Spirit. A shorter form of John's words is found in Mark 1:8; there, however, there is no mention of fire: `He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit'. Matthew, like Luke, adds the words `and with fire' (Matt. 3:11), and both Matthew and Luke go on to report further words of John about the Coming One: `His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire' (Matt. 3:12; Luke 3:17). It is worth bearing in mind that the same word is used in Greek, the language of the Gospels, for `Spirit', `breath' and `wind'; similarly in the language normally spoken by John and Jesus one and the same word did duty for all three concepts. The picture John draws is of the grain and the chaff lying piled up on the threshing floor after the harvest. The mixture of grain and chaff is tossed up into the air with the winnowing fork or shovel; the light chaff is blown away by the wind and the heavier grain falls back on the floor, from which it is collected to be stored in the granary. The chaff is then swept up and burned. Both the wind and the fire are symbols of the Holy Spirit; they depict the work that the Coming One is to do by the power of the Spirit, separating the true children of the kingdom from those who were only nominally so. (The figure of chaff is an ancient one in this kind of context: according to Psalm 1:4, `The wicked ... are like chaff which the wind drives away'.)
Jesus's ministry was not exactly the ministry of judgment which John envisaged, but a ministry of sifting and separating it certainly was. Yet Jesus plainly looked for something further when he said, `I came to set the earth on fire, and how I wish the fire had already broken out!'
One suggestion links these words with the hard saying which comes shortly afterwards in Luke 12:51-53, where Jesus says that he did not come to give peace on earth but rather division (see p. 150). We shall have to consider this hard saying also, but the difficulty about understanding his words about setting the earth on fire in the sense of the division and strife which he foresaw as the effect of his ministry lies in his earnest wish that the fire `were already kindled'. He foresaw the division and strife indeed as the effect of his ministry, but he did not desire it. It is more satisfactory to take these words as the expression of a longing for an outpouring of the Spirit in power the like of which had not yet been seen.
Jesus himself experienced a personal outpouring of the Spirit at his baptism in the Jordan. A pictorial account of this outpouring in terms of fire is preserved in the second-century Christian writer Justin Martyr: `When Jesus went down into the water a fire was kindled in the Jordan.'► The same figure appears in a saying ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas and elsewhere: `He who is near me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the kingdom.'2 The fire was there in Jesus's ministry, but the earth had not yet caught fire. One day it would catch fire in earnest, with the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; but Jesus himself had to die before this consummation could be realised, and while his death is not explicitly mentioned in these words about the fire, it is probably implied as a prospect beneath their surface. Hence the note of poignancy which can be discerned.