How much should faith “cost”? How many sacrifices are worth making for it? We would like to tell ourselves we would do anything for our faith, even sacrificing ourselves, such as so many martyrs and other saints have done in one form or another.

Today’s gospel is not a go-to guide for pyromaniacs. But it is about passion, the fire that consumes hearts, lives, and sometimes whole generations in its intensity. There is passion with a small “p,” like the kind that overwhelms acolytes of Marilyn Monroe or Cary Grant films who are still captivated by her screen radiance and his ebullient charisma.

“I’ve come to start a fire on this earth—how I wish it were blazing right now! I’ve come to change everything, turn everything rightside up—how I long for it to be finished! Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice?

Saving the lives of the ones you love can call for extreme measures, including setting the world ablaze. Auntie Mame, the free-spirited heroine of the classic movie, play, and book of the same name, resorted to this scorched-earth strategy when she saw her nephew and ward Patrick becoming, in her words, “one of the most beastly, bourgeois, babbitty little snobs on the Eastern seaboard.”

Chicago fourth-grader Charlie Mahay liked meeting kids who were different from him simply because “they’re interesting,” he would say. When he visited the mosque of his friend Isa (whose name is Arabic for Jesus), the main differences Charlie noted from how he worships at his Catholic parish were that you have to take off your shoes and sit on the floor.

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

Do not bind me; the one who has given me the strength to face the fire will also enable me to lie still on the pyre, with no need of your nails.