bringing fire

 

‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!’ Jesus

The Gospel writer Luke was a first-century Greek author who had decided to order his life around the claim that Jesus — not Caesar — was Lord, and who wrote for other Greeks who were interested in exploring the same claim. Jesus was a Jew, whose imagination of ‘how the world is’ was shaped by Jewish scriptures; but he lived in ‘Galilee of the Gentiles,’ alongside a Greek population, and would have been as familiar with Greek mythology as with his own cultural heritage.

So when Luke records Jesus saying ‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!’ his Greek audience would have immediately thought of Prometheus. Prometheus was a Titan, one of the ancient gods usurped by the younger — Olympian — gods. Prometheus himself had not fought against the Olympians, and so had been spared being thrown into Tartarus, the great pit deep within the underworld. Nonetheless, he had an uneasy relationship with Zeus. It was, so the Greeks told, Prometheus who had made humans — initially all male — from clay, and he loved his creatures dearly. In contrast, Zeus believed that humans were worthy only of making endless sacrifices to the gods. Prometheus tricked Zeus into being bound to accepting sacrifices of bones (wrapped in glistening fat) rather than choice meat (wrapped in an ox’s stomach) and in his capricious anger, Zeus withdrew fire — and with it, the means of technology, and ultimately civilisation — from humanity. But Prometheus stole fire back for his creatures. For this betrayal, Zeus had him chained to a mountain, where each day and eagle — symbol of Zeus, and later symbol of the Roman empire — would eat his liver, the seat of human emotion. Being immortal, each night his liver would regenerate, condemning Prometheus to an ageless torture. Zeus also created Pandora, the first woman, and tricked her into bringing misery into the human experience. Eventually, Prometheus is freed by Heracles, the half-human hero son of Zeus.

So when Luke records Jesus saying, ‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!’ — fire being a symbol of the divine presence, and a reference to the Holy Spirit — he is (also) making particular claims about Jesus with reference to Greek mythology. That is to say, that Jesus fulfils Greek stories as well as Jewish ones. He is claiming that Jesus is the god through whom humans were created; and a god who loves his creatures enough to suffer for them. He is making a claim as to what will happen on the cross, that instrument of torture on which the god of this age — the Zeus or Satan figure — is tricked out of his claim to all human life as an endless sacrifice.

The link to Prometheus is underlined by Jesus claiming that he had not come to bring uniformity to the human experience, but to differentiate between humans — claiming a right over and above family ties; this differentiation need not imply enmity — which points to the unfolding of the arts and sciences that flows from the gift of fire. The Spirit of Jesus will inspire great architecture, and scientific invention.

Luke is demonstrating that the stories of Prometheus make it plausible for Greeks to believe in a god who suffers for humanity. Nonetheless, Prometheus was not a god they venerated in any cultic sense. That a god who could be so humiliated, even for noble reasons, was worthy of worship was hard to imagine. At most, he was allowed to hang out with Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Hephaestus, god of invention.

But this is the choice Luke sets out, on which his audience must decide: to side with a capricious god who imposed his will through torture; or with the human god who willingly shared our suffering, transforming opposition to the divine will into God’s good purposes for us. Who suffered, died, and rose again.

It is just about plausible. But the choice must be made.

Luke 12.49-56

‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’

He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?’