Floods of Fire

“…Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket...” Is an overly familiar passage from Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. The implications that branch out of such a claim, though, are far deeper and realer, I think, than we give Jesus credit for. But let’s be honest, isn’t every quote of Jesus richer and more alive than all our words spoken at once? What good are our words? Brimming with filth and selfish failure, what use are we really? We say this verse from Matthew’s Gospel again and again; drill it against our foreheads; recite it into the air that’s thick with our self-righteous pride. Who do we think we are?

That, I believe, is just the point. We are lights. Sure sure. That’s nice. But there’s more here. Jesus says that he himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. When Jesus is transfigured, his presence becomes light. He is brighter than the sun and that glory explodes out to envelope both Moses and Elijah who are speaking with him. Again, when Jesus dies the sun too goes out. The loss of Jesus is the loss of light. It is not without reason that we celebrate Easter’s sunrise, specifically. We worship Jesus, the Light of the World. 

So if we are to be lights to the world, we are to be Jesus to the world. And apparently we’re terrifyingly dangerous. A light, hid under a basket, is not just useless. It’s destructive. It takes no time to burn a house down if there’s a basket close to a candle. The apostles knew this at Pentecost. When flames appear over the heads of 12 men, all in a single room, staying inside means burning the house down. So what is the alternative? Exactly what the apostles do. They go out, and they light up Jerusalem with their fire. Peter -I find it quite easy to say this -spews fire out on the Jews in his first sermon to them. And it burns them. It leaves them raw and throbbing. It leaves them like Job, like a dying Jesus, like a child. That is what the fire of Jesus does. That is the light of the world. It either stays in and burns things to the ground, or it goes out and burns things to the heavens. 

Here is where things get really wild. Paul speaks time and time again of being “in” Jesus. This is the same Paul who was literally thrown off a horse by pure light. It wasn’t a nice ray of sunshine. No. It was heavy, sharp, cutting enough to pierce his eyes and blind them. It was like a cattle prod. A goad, as they called it. And Paul was kicking against it the whole it. No use. It beat him. It threw him to the dirt and kept him there. 

It is this Paul that sees following Christ as something entirely other to the way of the Romans, of the Jews. He sees it opposed to them. It is a war. Those who follow Jesus, who are “in” him, are filled with dangerous power and are, in a very real way, threats to those powers around them. They carry fire in their eyes like Paul and fire in their mouths like Peter. Living with Jesus is terrifying. And it is the beginning of all things. Solomon knew such wildness. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…”

That is what Paul is so intent on in many of his epistles. Lit on fire himself, Paul wants to hammer into his disciples the reality of being “in” Jesus, of living within His life. It is, by very definition, a call to choose explosion over implosion. Paul’s exhortation, his cry, is a challenge to people like the Corinthians, Phillipians, Romans, Titus, and Timothy. It is a prayer to be filled with fire, to be blinded by its power, and to shatter the tidiness of the world by that fire. 

Paul’s exhortation in 2 Timothy, then, is a hurricane of hope and fear and power and life. He says in chapter 2 verse 11-13, 

This is a faithful saying:

For if we died with Him,
We shall also live with Him.
If we endure,
We shall also reign with Him.
If we deny Him,
He also will deny us.
 If we are faithless,
He remains faithful;
He cannot deny Himself.

Death is being burnt up. It is being consumed entirely. And yet the beauty of Jesus, of the way God works, is that his consumption is of a different kind entirely. It is the burning bush before Moses. It is a burning without destruction. The bush is eaten by flame, and yet it lives. This is the consumption of the sacrifices before God. They are caught up to heaven, not lost forever. It is Elijah who, it just so happens, is caught up in a chariot of fire. Alive. Dying with Jesus is life because it is the fire of God, the power of the World.
Paul, though, is no fool. He sees not just the great things that can happen, but the full scope of this power of Jesus, of this fire. It carries the power to deny. And that is a fearful reality. The greek here is fascinating. The idea being spoken is one of denouncing, of rebellion, of defiance. And what is defiance and rebellion but the beginning of a war? The power of that fire carries with it the power of war with God. If this does not make you fear your twisted, selfish, lying self, you’re either twisted, selfish or lying right now. 
And yet there is a beauty unmatched that Paul ends this with. The fire of Jesus is not just a thing we are left to deal with. It burns our own hands when we hold it. We misuse it. We doubt its power. We doubt our power. But we are in Christ. We live with his Life. It is his Light after all, his early dawn and his thundering sunset. It is his Easter. Our faithlessness, our failings do not distance us from Him. Because we are Him. Christ’s faithfulness is the power which rises when we fall. He refuses to deny us because we, consumed entirely by the fire of God, are like Elijah and Moses at the Transfiguration. We are thrown off our safe places like Paul and carried up to heaven like sacrifices. And in the end, the very light, the love, the wild fire of Jesus comes rushing out of us. God swore to never flood the earth again with torrents of water. But the Great Commission is an entirely different kind of consuming. The fire of God is a great flood, and it will make the whole world new.