Facing a challenge

In today’s reflection on the daily mass readings, Fr Richards considers the challenges that we face as people of faith in today’s world. These are not so very different from the challenges faced by people centuries ago. The question remains: how do we respond?

Readings for Thursday in 33rd week of Ordinary Time: 1 Maccabees 2.15-29; Psalm 50.1-2, 5-6, 14-15; Luke 19.41-44

How do you react when you switch on the news on the radio or TV, call up your favourite news website, or open the newspaper? Are you filled with hope and optimism at the state of the world, or are you consumed with anger, sadness and despair? Often, we might be forgiven for feeling the latter set of emotions. There always seems so much bad news, and that is to say nothing of the state of the church!

It is interesting to note, however, that such emotions are nothing new. In both of our readings today, we see people who are angered or saddened by what they see going on around them. In the reading from Maccabees, the king’s officials are trying to make the Jewish people renounce their faith, cultue and traditions. Mattathias bravely resists; when he sees a fellow Jew giving in and accepting the kings’s commands, he is consumed with zeal and anger. We are told that Mattathias kills not only the Jew who has forsaken his religion, but also the king’s officer who was forcing them to do so. Then he and his sons flee from the city to the hills. In the Gospel, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because of its rejection of him. He foretells that eventually disaster will come upon the city. 

As we reflect on the state of the world, and the church, today, these readings provide an important challenge. They ask us, effectively, which side we are on. Are we like those, who, in Mattathias’s day, were willing to compromise their faith for an easy life? Or are we like Mattathias himself, determined to remain faithful to God even at great cost to ourselves? And might we be like the city of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day, failing to recognise what God is doing in our very midst? Or do we have the courage to respond, to go where he would lead us, even if the path is uncertain and the destination not always clear?