Fighting Fire with Fire: A Homily for Pentecost

One Catholic Life

On this Solemnity of Pentecost the red vestments and red altar cloths are reminiscent of the fire that descended on the disciples. We see this color more and more in our own lives as the weather heats up and the fire season begins.

As we know so well from the fires that typically begin to plague us in the summer, fire can be destructive and deadly.

That’s one of the reasons pop singer Billy Joel used fire as a metaphor for chaos, crime, and war in his 1989 song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” He got the idea for the song from a conversation he’d had with a young man. Joel had just turned 40 years old, and the young man told him that the world was in an “unfixable mess.” When Joel tried to console him by saying, “I thought the same thing when I was your age,” the young man replied, “Yeah, but you grew up in the fifties, and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.”

Joel was taken aback by this and replied, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of Korea, the Hungarian freedom fighters, or the Suez Crisis?” Those events then became the origin of the song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Throughout the course of the song, Joel sings a litany of headlines from 1949 to 1989: North and South Korea, Joseph Stalin, the Thalidomide children, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Watergate, AIDS. And as Joel rattles off headline after headline, the chorus pounds out:

We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

It’s been over thirty years since Billy Joel wrote those words, and unfortunately we can keep adding to his list of headlines: the pandemic, the epidemic of school shootings, the war in Ukraine. And on and on and on.

It sometimes seems that our world has always been engulfed in a raging wildfire, and we don’t know how to put it out.

How do we fight it?

One possible answer is to fight fire with fire.

We see the fire of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles today. “From the sky a noise like a strong driving wind,” “tongues as of fire.” It sounds like a wildfire from heaven.

The Holy Spirit descends like fire upon the disciples gathered together, but unlike a wildfire, it does not consume them. This is a different kind of fire.

Think of the burning bush on Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Law. God was present in a bush that burned but was not consumed, and from that fire God gave Moses the Law. It was that Law that connected the Israelites to their God. For generations, the way to be in relationship to God was to be faithful to the Law, to follow the instructions of the Torah.

For Jews, Pentecost celebrates the giving of the Torah, the giving of the Law to God’s people. The Law comes to Moses from a burning bush that is not consumed.

It is fitting then, that it is on Pentecost that the disciples receive the fire that burns but does not consume. The Law is now written on their hearts. That burning bush now dwells within them. They burn with God’s presence and are not consumed.

We, too, have received this fire. Through Baptism, Confirmation, and the continued reception of the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit has come to us “like a strong driving wind,” in “tongues as of fire.”

So on the one hand we have the raging fire of violence, destruction, and death outlined by Billy Joel’s song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and on the other we have the fire of the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles.

Is this how we fight the fire that Billy Joel writes about? Do we fight fire with fire?

Yes. And no.

When we hear the phrase “fight fire with fire,” we likely think of using an opponent’s strategy against him or her.

For instance, in politics, if an opponent starts slinging mud, then a candidate might fire with fire by slinging mud right back.

Or in business, if I’m competing for a promotion and someone tries to make me look bad to ruin my chances, then I might decide to fight fire with fire and try to make them look bad, too.

Or personally, if someone’s always picking on me or insulting me, then I could fight fire with fire and insult them right back.

But this isn’t the original meaning of fighting fire with fire.

The phrase “fighting fire with fire” comes from a strategy in battling wildfires. When a wildfire begins to get out of control, firefighters deliberately set what’s called a back fire in the path of the oncoming wildfire. This is not so that the two fires “battle it out.” Instead, as the back fire burns, it consumes fuel so that the primary fire has no tinder when it reaches the edge of the fire line.

The back fire burns up the grassland, the vegetation, and other flammable material so that when the main fire arrives, there is nothing left to burn. It can’t spread.

The Holy Spirit is like a back fire for our world. The Holy Spirit consumes the fuel for our fires. It’s like the refining fire in the book of the prophet Malachi that we hear during Advent. The Holy Spirit burns away our prejudice, our pride, our doubts, and our fears.

When we burn with the love of God in our hearts, there’s no room for fires of rage and hatred.

The key to stopping the wildfires in our culture is to allow the Holy Spirit to do its work of burning away the jealousy, hatred, prejudice, and fear that lie within us.

This is what the first Christians did. It’s what the saints have done throughout the ages. They set back fires of the Holy Spirit to starve the raging fires of sin.

The first disciples didn’t fight fire with fire by battling the Romans. They fought the fires of persecution with fires of baptism.

And that, too, is our call. Jesus’ words to the disciples are meant for us too: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

On this Solemnity of Pentecost, we remember our call to bring the Holy Spirit to the world, the fire within us that burns without consuming.

It’s a fire that says, “Turn the other cheek.”

It’s a fire that says, “Love your enemies.”

It’s the fire that gave St. Thomas More the determination to stand up to Henry VIII.

It’s the fire that gave St. Maximilian Kolbe the confidence to give his life in place of a stranger at Auschwitz.

It’s the fire that sustained Mother Teresa through years of discouragement and darkness.

It’s the same fire that St. Ignatius of Loyola was talking about when he told the Jesuits to “set the world aflame.”

This is the fire that makes a difference in the world.

It makes a difference in our personal lives, and it makes a difference in our culture.

It burns away our selfishness, our pettiness, our prejudices, and our fears, so that they can be replaced by self-giving love.

We see that fire most clearly in the burning heart of Jesus hanging on the cross, not a political leader come to overthrow the Romans with the fire of battle, but a servant leader come to transform hearts with the fire of sacrificial love.

It is His Holy Spirit we celebrate today, and it is his Spirit that sets our hearts on fire so that we can fight the fire of sin with the fire of the Holy Spirit.