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Homily for the 20th Ordinary Sunday C, 17th August 2025
Jesus is often puzzling.
When He speaks of a fire which He is bringing on earth, we think of a living flame of love, and we already feel, as it were, the stimulating gift and the comforting presence of the Holy Spirit.
When He mentions a baptism with which He has to be baptized, the shade of the Cross begins to appear on our world, which is always at first sobering.
When He tells us that He has not come to give peace, but rather division, we do not like it; or rather, we find it difficult to understand. What is this sword which separates members of the same family?
All this is deeply puzzling. We do not want to explain it too quickly, because we do not want to soften it. We want the full truth. We know that Jesus is the Truth, and we are ready to pay the price for the truth.
These are words of Jesus which we have to entrust to the memory of our heart. Mary, whose Assumption we have just celebrated, knew how to keep Jesus’ words and actions in her heart, always pondering them. She was not in a hurry to understand. She knew God reveals to us the meaning of His words and His actions in a progressive manner. Things which at first were obscure, one day become clearer. Only a loving heart can understand another heart.
For Jesus expresses here some of the deepest movements of His Heart. He reveals to us the direction of His soul. Jesus is inhabited through and through by a great desire that we all be made burning with the fire of His love. For this, He is ready to go His Passion, to be baptised into death and raised from the dead. Out of love, Jesus longs for the Cross which is the mysterious way He takes to love us to the end. He knows, too, that we are not all ready to follow Him on the way to the Calvary. He knows that it is extremely difficult for us to accept that love and peace are given to us through the mystery of the Cross. Some receive the grace to accept it. Others have not yet received this grace. Others seem to say No. We can be each of these at different moments in our life. Jesus’ passionate love would like to gather all in one embrace of love and peace, but He knows that this is not possible yet. His presence is accepted by some but rejected by others. His words act like a sword, as the Letter to the Hebrews has it: “The word of God is living and active, shaper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrows, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (4:12).
The most important thing is that we let this Word of God do its work in us. Mary is the one who fully received the Word of God, to the point that He was made flesh of her and in her. We, too, are called to receive God’s word and to let it take flesh in us. The loving Heart of Mary was able to keep in living unity at the same time the joy of Christmas, the grief of Good Friday, the loss of Holy Saturday, and the joy of Easter morning. So, too, our heart can learn to echo Jesus’ Heart. His Word can become the rule of our life. His sword can make in us these wounds of love of which St John of the Cross so beautifully wrote:
Oh, living flame of love that tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest centre. Oh, sweet cautery! Oh, delectable wound! Oh, soft hand! In slaying me, you have changed death into life.