33rd Week in Ordinary Time 2023 - Monday - Persevering faith amidst a culture of death

 300 years before the birth of Christ, Alexander the Great embarked on a mission to Hellenize the world—that is, to spread the greek language, the greek culture, the greek Gods.  He conquered vast territories from Greece, down to Egypt, and just shy of India to the east.  

But Alexander didn’t plan well; he died suddenly leaving his vast empire, which included Israel, to his generals—Ptolemy and Seleucus. Judea was initially under Ptolemaic rule, but fell to the Seleucids around 200 BC.

Ptolemaic rule was fairly sensitive and tolerant of the Jewish religion, but things changed when the Seleucid tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes came to power, whose
name we heard in the first read today.  Radical Hellenization was imposed under penalty of death-- the Jews could not worship, nor could they practice their faith in any way that distinguished them from the Gentiles. So they could not observe the Sabbath, they could not observe the laws of circumcision.

And we also heard how some of the Jews believed it was expedient to go along with Hellenization. And they even influence the jewish king to order that the jews abandon the precepts of the Mosaic Law in favor of the Greek custom—they were to abandon the laws of God for the laws of man. What a sell-out to the culture! This even led to the Holy Temple of Jerusalem dedicated to the One True God becoming a place of pagan worship and pagan sacrifice.

As people of faith, we need to be in the world, but not of the world. There can be no compromise between the laws of God and the laws of man. 

In the Gospel, a blind man is hindered by the crowd in approaching Jesus in order to be healed by him. The crowd here is similar to the Greeks and the hellenized jews in the first reading. There are many worldly forces that will keep us from approaching Jesus, even compromised Christians will try to convince us that we are taking our faith too seriously. 

But we must persevere. If the world seeks to drown out our cries for Jesus, we need to cry out all the more. If the world seeks to distract us from following Jesus, we need to draw close to Him all the more. If Christians abandon the work of the Gospel, we need to endeavor in that work all the more. If born and raised Catholics abandon the Sacraments, we need to make use of them all the more, lest we become like them, instead of becoming like Christ.

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That we may endeavor to put our time, talent, treasure, creativity, and devotion into serving the mission of the Gospel. 

For a strengthening of Christian marriages; for an increase in virtue among spouses; for healing in troubled marriages; and for God’s mercy to replace bitterness, resentment, and selfishness. 

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, we pray for the safety of travelers, the peaceful resolution of all family divisions and national hostilities, for protection from disease, and harmony amongst all those who gather; for the lonely and forgotten, and that holy gratitude may fill our hearts and animate our lives.

For the safety of police and firefighters, for first responders, the underemployed and unemployed, for those struggling with addiction, for the incarcerated, for those suffering from depression or burn-out, and for the sick and dying. 

We pray in a special way during this Month of November, for all of the faithful departed, for the deceased members of our family, friends, and parish, for all the souls in purgatory, and for…

O God, you know that our life in this present age is subject to suffering and need, hear the prayers of those who cry to you and receive the prayers of those who believe in you. Through Christ our Lord.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021 - Be obnoxious to the wicked

One of the books of the Old Testament that is perennially useful to meditate upon is the book of wisdom, from which our first reading is taken this weekend. Scripture Scholars tell us that the Book of Wisdom, also know as the Wisdom of Solomon, was written in Alexandria Egypt, making it different from the other books of the old testament, not only for where it was written, but because of the fact it was written in Greek, rather than in Hebrew. 

And the book wasn't in fact written by Solomon, rather it was the very last book of the Old Testament to be written, composed just about 50 years before the birth of Jesus. The book was written primarily to the Jews of the Diaspora. The Greek General Ptolomy after conquering the Holy Land, sent nearly 120,000 Jews into exile, mostly to Egypt. And so, this book, the book of wisdom, was written to them, to the Jews exiled from the Holy Land—to give them the religious guidance, the wisdom, they would need in order to be on guard against the temptations they might experience in the Egyptian culture—with its many forms idolatry. 

Sadly, the book is written, also, in response to a number of Jewish exiles who had apostatized—they had given up their Jewish faith in favor of the pagan practices of the Greeks who dominated Alexandria. So, the faithful Jews would not only have to be on guard against the pressures from the surrounding pagan culture, but they’d have to withstand pressure from their own kind, their own people who forsaken the faith. 

In the passage today, we hear of the wicked conspiring against the faithful—the wicked, being those former Jews who had turned their hearts from the covenant. “Let us beset the just one,” the wicked say, “because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training.” 

The wicked apostates are depicted as conspiring against the holy ones, because the holy ones remind them of what they left behind when they abandoned their faith. The righteous ones were making the wicked nervous because by their good deeds they showed that the way of the wicked leads to doom. 

One of the prevailing philosophies of the Greeks, one of the prevailing philosophies of Alexandria at the time was the philosophy of Hedonism. Eat drink and be merry, over-indulgence, avoid any suffering, sexual promiscuity and libertinism. The wicked had traded the beautiful covenant with God for deviant Hedonism.

We live in a very Hedonistic culture don’t we? Instant gratification and instant pleasure are idolized, promiscuity is normalized.  The Church is often attacked because she reminds our hedonistic culture that there is more to life than just seeking pleasure all the time. Christians are seen as obnoxious to the wicked, for we engage in many practices that Hedonists consider foolish: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, chastity, poverty, obedience, self-sacrifice, study, going out into the streets and serving the poor, patiently enduring suffering for the good of souls.

In a way, I think, the Word of God is giving us our marching orders this morning.  Be obnoxious to the wicked.  Be so holy, take your faith so seriously, engage in the works of mercy so devoutly, that you make the wicked a little nervous.  It might just cause him to rethink his life.

the wicked are ignoring us, because they don’t us as a threat to their hedonistic ways, are we really living the faith? If we are blending in with the wicked, valuing the same things they do, then are we really on the path of life?

In the Gospel, the Lord foretells his suffering and death.  Why did the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day plot against him to torture and kill him? He had become obnoxious to them.  He told them that to inherit the kingdom of God, you had to repent, you had to not only be externally observant of God’s laws, you had to transform your heart. 

Mercy is to be extended not only to those who can repay you, but even to those who persecute you, you have to treat as family even those who are of different ethnicities than you, you have to go and touch the leper and wash him clean. Obnoxious behavior for the pious Jewish Pharisee of the 1st century.

Taking a child, and placing it in their midst, and saying, you need to become like, was obnoxious behavior to the great scholars of the law. To the Pharisee, a child is so insignificant, they have nothing to hold over anybody, no power, and Jesus is saying, yes, exactly. How obnoxious. To welcome women into his band of disciples, to eat with tax collectors and prostitutes, to lay hands on lepers, all obnoxious behavior, all to show that God’s love extends to all.

After communion today, we’ll hear from Margaret McIntyre a volunteer with the Franciscan capuchins and the Catholic Volunteer network. The founder of the Franciscans, St. Francis, had a wonderful title, “God’s fool. He was foolish for Christ, he was obnoxious for Christ, he was obnoxious to the worldly and woke them up from their selfishness through a life of preaching, poverty, and penance.

To become a saint, we must be willing to be obnoxious in our faith, obnoxious to the wicked. That would be my dismissal from mass today if we could change the words of the mass: go forth and be obnoxious to the wicked, thanks be to God, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.