THIRTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
6 NOVEMBER 2016
The
Second Book of Maccabees takes us back to a very difficult time in the history
of Israel. Two hundred years before the
birth of Christ, the Seleucid Greeks had occupied Israel. The King, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, decided
that he could control a united kingdom by forcing everyone to embrace the same
religion. So, he desecrated the Temple
of Jerusalem and demanded that everyone submit to the gods which he worshiped
(mostly himself, to be honest). Anyone
who chose to resist would be executed.
That is the
context for today’s first reading. The
king dragged a mother and her seven sons and put them to the test. If they would eat pork, forbidden by the Law
of Moses, their lives would be spared.
However, each son adamantly refused, and each son was brutally tortured
and finally executed, along with their mother.
It is a good thing that we are spared those horrible details, because
our assembly includes lots of small children.
All seven
sons resisted, along with their mother, because their faith was incredibly
important to them. They knew in their hearts
that the false gods of the Greeks did not exist, and they could not compromise
their consciences. More importantly,
they resisted because they believed that death was not the end. They believed that the true God whom they
worshipped would bring justice to those who murdered them and eternal life to
all who remained faithful.
Unfortunately,
what happened to the children of Israel two hundred years before the birth of
Christ continues in our world today. We
continue to see horrifying images of Christians being executed for their
faith. Last year, the Islamic State
marched a group of Chaldean Christians in Libya to a beach on the Mediterranean
Sea in orange jump suits. When the
Christians refused to deny their faith, the Islamic militants beheaded
them. Pope Francis recently canonized a
14 year old Mexican boy who refused to deny his faith at the beginning of the
20th century when the secular Mexican government banned
Catholicism. He was brutally tortured
and ultimately shot when he continued to shout “viva, Christo Rey!” (Long live
Christ the King). Father Sryian is at
the Mass in the church telling about the persecutions against his religious
order as they try to evangelize the people of Sri Lanka.
The witness
of these martyrs reminds us of the critical importance of our faith in Jesus
Christ and the need to express it in our daily lives. But it also reminds us that death will not be
the end for us. As Saint Paul says, the
Lord is faithful to us and will share his resurrection with us, if we share his
dying on a daily basis. As the Lord
himself reminds us in the Gospel, the risen life is a transformed life. That is what the Sadducees did not
understand. They saw eternal life as
ridiculous, because they imagined it as this same old life which continues in
eternity.
During this
month of November, we remember our loved ones who have already passed into
death, praying for them and asking the Lord to purify them and share with them
the fullness of his resurrection. In
doing so, we reinforce our own faith in the Paschal Mystery for ourselves. If
we die to ourselves, we will live with Christ – not in the same familiar
patterns of our daily lives, but in the transformed life of the Saints
surrounding God’s throne.
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