Vigils Reading

THE FIRE OF LOVE

By John of Ford

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‘May your will’, Lord Jesus, ‘be done on earth as it is in heaven for you,̓

said that it was your will that fire be enkindled on this earth, the fire you came to

send upon it. What you desired has happened. The furnace that is in Jerusalem

has enkindled a furnace on earth. Here on earth, just as in heaven, you have

made your ministers flames of fire, and like a devouring fire, they devour to the

right and to the left.

Indeed, love is never satisfied. It feels distaste for nothing, it does not

think anything should be rejected. It issues its call equally to the good and to the

bad, receiving them indiscriminately and making no distinction in favor of one

rather than the other. The only distinction, perhaps, is that it usually overflows

more copiously for those in whom sin has abounded. It is characteristic of love

that, like fire, it burns more fiercely where it finds sturdier tinder, and the

quality and quantity of what instigates it, makes its flame grow ever stronger.

Jesus makes this crystal clear in his parable of the two debtors; it is the one who

is forgiven most who loves most). He loves more, says Jesus, to whom more is

given; he loves more, meaning that he is urged by the debt and the material is

there to prompt him to greater love.

In my opinion, this is why Zechariah said those words I quoted above, that he

would make ‘the clans of Judah like a blazing pot in the midst of wood, like a

flaming torch among the sheaves Obviously, because wood is harder than hay, it is.̓

better material for fires, and the more difficult it is to set it burning, the more it

blazes up once it has begun. It seems to change into the very substance of fire,

taking on its color as well as its heat. The sheaves, on the other hand, are those

whose sins are venial, and the flaming torch, that is, the opportunity to be forgiven

and receive unmerited grace, consumes them with a spark. Yet it is not a fiery spark

that touches the wood, but a furnace, so that, in some wonderful way, the wood

itself becomes fire by the intensity of the heat. And the wood takes to itself not only

the ability to burn, but also to enkindle.