49 I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 I have a baptism to undergo, and how stressed I am until it is accomplished!

51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? Absolutely not. But I assure you, it is division that I have come to bring. 52 Thus, from now on, out of five people in a house, they will be divided, three against two, and two against three. 53 More specifically, the division will be between father and son, and son and father, mother and daughter, and daughter and mother, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law and mother-in-law.

What is the fundamental challenge of all human life?

Newspaper headlines continue to bombard us with news from the United States that is sparking heated debate. Most recently, discussions have centered on a controversial bill known as the "big, beautiful bill." What are its key elements? First, the bill makes permanent the corporate and individual income tax cuts that the first Trump administration had established on a temporary basis. In addition, tips and overtime would no longer be subject to taxation. On the spending side, there are significant increases in the defense and border protection budgets. If spending is increased in some areas, it must be reduced in others. As a result, additional restrictions have been added to the healthcare program, such as the requirement to work if you are not disabled and to re-enroll in the program every six months. It is estimated that a large number of Americans will lose their health coverage because they will be unable to comply with the new administrative requirements. All financial incentives for energy transition are being eliminated. Finally, reforms have been made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is used by more than 40 million low-income Americans, requiring people without dependents to work and forcing states to contribute more.

Why has this bill sparked such heated debate? Because, on the one hand, it provides support to high-income earners who will be able to become even wealthier, while penalizing the poorest, and on the other hand, it will increase the national debt to such an extent that future generations will face a colossal challenge. The entire nation is divided on the issue. Such division is understandable when fundamental values are at stake: enrichment or solidarity, the rule of the strongest or compassion, concern only for one's own world or that of all generations.

When a decision touches on major issues for humanity, it always causes division, because it challenges our deepest values and our orientation in life. And this is exactly the subject addressed in today's Gospel reading from Luke.

Let us first focus on the second part of the story, where Jesus declares that he did not come into this world to bring peace, but division. Note that this is Luke's version of a story also reported by Matthew, who speaks instead of a sword, i.e., war. Regardless of what Jesus may have actually said, Luke reinterprets the tradition in reference to the beginnings of the first Christian communities and the family divisions he observed. It should be remembered that in the Greco-Roman world, when people were baptized, they broke with pagan temples and, by extension, with a large part of civic life, which was considered an act of disloyalty to the emperor and the city.

Let us note how Luke represents these divisions. For him, the extended family is composed of five people: the father, the mother, who also plays the role of mother-in-law, the son, the daughter, and the daughter-in-law (who we must imagine as the son's wife). For Luke, the conflict takes place between groups: two against three, three against two. Why? We are not dealing with individual conflicts, such as discussing the color of walls we like or dislike, or favorite vacation spots. We are dealing with conflicts over the deeper meaning of things, conflicts of values and life orientation. Different groups form around the deeper meaning of things and values. Curiously, Luke presents the conflict between these groups as a generational conflict by first naming the older ones: father against son, mother against daughter, stepmother against daughter-in-law. We can therefore imagine that the older members were guardians of tradition and that it was the younger members who were seduced by the Christian message and accepted baptism. But we may be surprised by the repetition of the protagonists: a father against a son, a son against a father, a mother against a daughter, a daughter against a mother, etc. Why repeat the protagonists of the conflict by reversing them? The reason seems simple: the conflict is not a case of persecution where one protagonist is attacked by another, but rather both groups are active in the conflict.

What is the source of this conflict or division? We must now consider the first part of our story.

Jesus says that he has come to bring fire to the earth. What does this fire refer to? In the prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, fire sometimes refers to the fire used by blacksmiths to purify ore, thereby removing the dross and isolating the desired metal, whether gold, silver, or copper. it is a method of separating what we want to discard from what we want to keep. Jesus therefore presents his mission as a project of purification, identifying and separating inauthentic beings from authentic ones. But why does he add, "How I wish this fire were already lit!" This sentence presupposes that the fire is not yet lit. When will it be lit? The answer is in the following verse.

Luke puts these words in Jesus' mouth: "I must be submerged in a form of baptism, and I am stressed until everything is accomplished." What does this mean? In this sentence, we recognize Luke's vocabulary, and he quite clearly refers to Jesus' tragic end, his death on the cross, the fate of criminal slaves. Thus, the fire Jesus speaks of will not really be lit until this tragic end has come to pass. How are we to understand all this?

We know from experience that there are events in life that are revelatory, that encapsulate a person's identity in a way. Take the example of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest who, while imprisoned in Auschwitz in July 1941, heard a man being led to his execution cry out: "My poor wife! My poor children! What will become of them?" offered himself to the German officer to take the place of this poor man; this powerful decision encapsulates the direction of an entire life. Let us also take the example of Donald Trump. His "great and beautiful bill" encapsulates a life in the service of wealth, using intimidation and the law of the strongest, where solidarity, compassion, and humility belong to the "losers." What, then, does the miserable death of Jesus encapsulate?

Evangelists such as Luke wrote an entire book in an attempt to summarize his life, a life in which he asked people to refuse to repay evil with evil, to show compassion to all human beings and to care for the poorest and most marginalized, and in which he denounced those who used religion to establish their power and enrich themselves, a life marked by acts of compassion toward the sick he encountered along the way, and his rejection of power and honors, a life in which human needs took precedence over all laws, a life in which his fundamental belief that a force of love, an echo of a mystery he calls "his Father," is at work in the world and to which he asks us to open ourselves, a force that calls us to form one family. Jesus not only taught, but he lived his teaching, or rather, he taught his life. But the power of his teaching and his life aroused fierce opposition, because it attacked the world of power and money head-on. The way he died is entirely consistent with his teaching and his life, as he was without control or power, inhabited only by the power of love and his fundamental belief that, despite all that we can observe, this power of love will triumph. And for Luke, the credibility of the testimony of those who experienced that Jesus, after his death, is mysteriously alive, even if this life belongs to another dimension, led him to affirm that the mystery at the source of this world, which we call God, confirmed that the path he took is the right path.

This account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, encapsulated by his death, is in a way the fire that forces everyone to take a stand on the fundamental direction of their lives. It creates divisions between those for whom this path is futile, uninteresting, and leading nowhere, and those who believe that it is the only way to become fully human.

Let's face it, the divisions mentioned in the Gospel are something we experience almost every day in our lives. When the headlines present us with the big winners of our economic and political world, showing all the control they wield in the world, don't we feel the ridiculous and futile nature of the call to take the slow and patient path of selfless love? Shouldn't we immediately side with the losers? It is at this moment that we must remember that human beings are fundamentally made to love, to give, to enter into fraternal relationships, and it is only by living all this that they feel themselves to be themselves, that they experience deep joy; have we ever seen such deep joy in despots and those who call themselves "winners"? And for the believer, knowing that he has been preceded on this path by someone who has found infinite life, allowing him now to continue his work without time restrictions, all this inspires in him boundless hope.

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-André Gilbert, Gatineau, July 2025