Monday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s reading from Maccabees is the kind of reading that makes the bible seem particularly foreign and strange to us. The conquest of Alexander the Great, a gymnasium in Jerusalem, a “horrible abomination” built on the altar of burnt offerings. Huh? This stuff is a far cry from our world of Netflix, work commutes, and soccer practices. Or is it?
This passage from Maccabees sets the stage for the story of God’s chosen people, Israel, fighting to maintain their identity--as imparted to them by God--under the tyrannical rule of a Greek king. The king has commanded that they stop all the practices that are particular to them as a people. The things that make them the same as each other but different from other people under his rule.
The king desires that “his whole kingdom should be one people” (1.41). And in order to make one people he has to control religion and make sure that it is subject to the demands of the state. But the king doesn’t eliminate “religious freedom” or “religious diversity.” In fact, he enforces it. We’re told that he orders the Israelites to “build pagan altars and temples and shrines, to sacrifice swine and unclean animals” (1.47). He multiplies the religious options available to the people! But the one religion that the king cannot tolerate is the true religion of Israel, which says that God is higher than any human king and God's law is higher than any human law. And so, we are told, “Whoever was found with a scroll of the covenant, and whoever observed the law, was condemned to death” (1.57).
I don’t think that Christians in the U.S. are in danger of violent persecution anytime soon. But many of us sense that, regardless of which political party is in power, we seem, increasingly, to be living under a tyranny. It hides behind the proliferation of consumer products and ever-louder calls for self-expression and individualism. It encourages “religious liberty” and “diversity.” But the one thing that it cannot tolerate is the idea that there is one God, that there is one way, and that the “one people” God is making is not any tribe or party or state, but a Church. On the night that he gave us the Eucharist, Jesus prayed that “his whole kingdom would be one people” (see John 17.20-23). May we work and pray for unity in the Church. And may we have the courage to practice the practices that make us the same as each other, and different from the world.
-Jeremy Dowsett