Sunday 17 August 2025
20rd Sunday During the Year – Year C
Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

Today's readings:
1st reading: Jeremiah 38,4-6.8-10
Psalm: 39 (40), 2, 3, 4, 18
2rd reading: Hebrews 12,1-4
Gospel: Luke 12,49:53-XNUMX

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“I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” This word of the Lord perhaps evokes the event of Pentecost where the gift of the Holy Spirit will be manifested by tongues of fire which thus come to bring the fire of charity into the hearts of the disciples, the fire which illuminates the intelligence to contemplate the mystery of God and to deepen it throughout one's life. But then why, if this fire that Jesus comes to light is the fire of charity, why does Jesus say: I did not come to bring peace on earth, but rather division. ? 

I don't know if you happen to frequent what are wrongly called social networks, it's impressive to see the amount of contempt, hatred, invective, insults, that one can read in the exchanges. This makes me personally realize that, truly, man left to himself does not love charity and has no desire at all to become charitable, that is to say to love as God loves. We need a true conversion to dare to love even those who do not love me, to love those who have opinions diametrically opposed to mine, to love those who hurt me. This is why the author of the Letter to the Hebrews invites us to fix your eyes on Jesus, and not just any old way. Let's listen again: “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the originator and finisher of our faith. Having forsaken the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising its shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” The author of the Letter to the Hebrews invites us to contemplate Jesus on the cross, because it is there, on the cross, that Jesus shows us both the depth and the consequence of sin, and also the depth of God's merciful love.

When we contemplate Jesus on the cross, we are first shown the consequences of our sins: Look at what you are doing when you refuse to love: you are leading your brother to death; when you refuse to love, you are crucifying your brother. And Jesus, with his arms outstretched on the cross, says to us: Look at what you are doing. He identifies with every man wounded by the sin of his brothers: Look where this leads you.

But at the same time, we know that Jesus, the Son of God made man, came to consent to this ignominious death, to consent to receive in his humanity death from his brothers, to be able in his resurrection, in his victory over death, to deliver us from our sins. So that contemplating Jesus on the cross, we contemplate this great love with which God loved men, loved the world and we can cry out with Saint Therese: Jesus did crazy things for us. (Cf. LT 169)

The cross, therefore, manifests both the gravity of sin and the ever-increasing depth of God's mercy. And it is by contemplating Christ on the cross that we can then allow ourselves to be delivered from our own sins, that is, from what weighs us down, what hinders us so well, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, to be able to run, to run after the Lord. It is by allowing ourselves to be delivered from our interior complicity with sin, with death, that we can love charity, and that we can desire to grow in charity, that we can finally desire in our turn to imitate Jesus, who stops evil, not with laws, with decrees or with violence, but who stops evil by taking it upon himself, by dying for it and by receiving the life stronger than death of the Father's love. This is a great mystery that we will not have enough of eternity to contemplate. 

And Thérèse is very sensitive to this: her sister Céline, who entered Carmel in 1884 under the name of Sister Geneviève, after Thérèse's death, writes about her memories of her novitiate, she mentions Thérèse, of course, she says:

Once, while she was holding the Epistles of Saint Paul, she called me and said enthusiastically: “Listen, this is what the Apostle says: ‘You are not approaching a mountain that hands can touch (through love), nor a burning fire, nor a whirlwind…but Mount Zion, the city of the living God, which is the heavenly Jerusalem, and myriads of angels and the company of our elders… for our God is a consuming fire.” » [Hebrews 12, 18,22,23,29, XNUMX, XNUMX, XNUMX]. 

(This is the last verse of chapter 12, the beginning of which we are reading today.)

And, Sister Geneviève continues:

And taking up these last words, she commented on them to me with emotion. 

(Advice and memories of Sister Geneviève) Saint Teresa is seized by this fire of God's love, by the fact that God "is only love," one could say, and that this love comes to set our hearts ablaze. This is why we must focus our gaze on Jesus, we must contemplate Jesus, we must constantly return to him, and our meditation on the Gospels must be incessant. Saint Teresa of Avila insisted greatly on the contemplation of the humanity of Jesus, precisely because he joins us in our humanity. Jesus is not a superman, he is not above humanity, he is within it. And when we contemplate the lives of the saints who took Jesus seriously—Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus is one of many—we see clearly that they allowed themselves to be transformed by the charity of God and that they themselves entered into this movement of charity. This is why Jesus must truly be the one we contemplate, the one on whom our eyes are fixed. 

Thérèse, who had recently entered Carmel, wrote to Sister Agnès (her sister Pauline):

jesus alone, just him. The grain of sand is so small - it is an image that she uses with her sister: she compares herself to the grain of sand in relation to the mountains that are the saints - the grain of sand is so small that if it wanted to put another than itself in its heart there would no longer be room for Jesus... (LT 054 - To Sister Agnes of Jesus - July 4 (?) 1888)

The following year, she wrote: 

God is admirable, but above all he is lovable, so let us love him... let us love him enough to suffer for him whatever he wants, even the pains of the soul, the aridities, the anguish, the apparent coldness... ah! that is a great love to love Jesus without feeling the sweetness of this love... this is martyrdom… Well! let us die Martyrs. Oh! my Céline… the sweet echo of my soul, do you understand?… (LT 094 – To Céline – July 14, 1889)

And Thérèse asks us the same question: do you understand? That loving Jesus is not always a sweetness, that loving Jesus more than anything, above all... — We asked in the opening prayer of the Mass to love God more than anything, in all things... — loving Jesus above all is not made of a sensible love that consoles. At times, this love for Jesus is very dry because we do not feel it, we do not see Jesus, we do not touch him... sometimes even his word does not move us. But that does not prevent us from continuing to love him. 

Beloved Lamb, wrote, a few days later, Thérèse to Sister Agnes, that it is good to work for Jesus alone, for Him ALONE!… 

And at the end of her life, in a famous letter to Abbé Bellière, she wrote to him:

I will desire the same thing in Heaven as on earth: Love Jesus and make him loved.

In coming here, to this basilica, to Saint Therese, we do not come to seek anything other than the love of Jesus, to understand with our hearts more fully how much Jesus loves each of us, and how much the joy of our life, the very meaning of our life, is in return to love Jesus and to make him loved. Amen.

Father Emmanuel Schwab, Rector of the Shrine