Homily for Friday, 17 October 2014– Memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch

Friday of the 28th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 1:11-14; Psalm 33:1-2, 4-5, 12-13; Luke 12:1-7

What are some things that we fear? When I was a very young boy, I wanted to become a firefighter. There was one problem with this, though: I was afraid of the sound of sirens. So here, a few steps in vocational discernment later, I am a priest and not a firefighter!

I am sure that our fears as we grow; become adults; progress through life become somewhat more complex. Jesus, though, speaks of one basic fear that I wonder if it ever leaves us, no matter how courageous we may be: The fear of death.

Jesus says to his disciples in Luke’s Gospel, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but after that can do no more.” Let us put ourselves in the place of Jesus’ disciples. By this point in Jesus’ public ministry, would they have known clearly that Jesus’ life was going to end in a humiliating death; that of a common criminal on a cross? Would this not have made Jesus’ disciples afraid not only for Jesus’ life but for their own lives?

Perplexingly yet comfortingly, Jesus invites his disciples not to fear death. But he does not entirely dismiss fear, which is natural, human, and sometimes an appropriate reaction to obvious danger. Jesus says this to his disciples after inviting them not to fear either their deaths or his: “Be afraid of the one who after killing has the power to cast into Gehenna.” The significance of Gehenna here is that this was the place outside the city walls of Jerusalem where garbage burned and the poor, the ritually unclean, and the especially wicked were often buried in undignified graves. If there were a hell on earth for anyone living in Israel in Jesus’ time, Gehenna was it. Just the mental image of Gehenna would have struck fear in Jesus’ hearers of today’s Gospel.

Do not fear death, Jesus asks us, but do fear hell. And yet fear hell and the one “who has the power to cast into Gehenna,” into hell, only in the context of God’s love and mercy toward us. Would a loving and merciful God who created us in God’s own image and likeness; next to God in dignity and worth, allow us to be cast into hell easily? I think not.

This does not mean that we test God by acting in ways beneath the worth with which we were created and called as daughters and sons of God. This does not mean that we may not encounter ridicule or, less likely, true persecution and even martyrdom for our faith. As we celebrate today the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred in Rome about one hundred years after Jesus’ time, we recognize that courageous disciples continue to be martyred in our time.

And yet this is not to make us fearful. Do not fear death, Jesus says. Fear hell and the one who can cast us into hell but, more importantly than any fear, trust God who saves; who in Christ will be victorious over the power of hell itself.