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,