Is Your Hope Full of Immortality?

A reflection for the Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time by Heidi Knofczynski

I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God

As I pondered the readings for the Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, which contain the passages from Second Maccabees telling the story of the hellish torture and execution of seven brothers and their mother, I was reminded that, in this world, sometimes places of horror and suffering are places where the Kingdom of Heaven emerges powerfully from those who call upon the Lord. Enduring hope is kindled in these places of earthly desolation, and true freedom, for God is the God of life, not of death, a God of freedom from fear and tyranny. Are you truly as free as you are meant to be?

…that we may be delivered from perverse and wicked people,

Fast forward to Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ encounter with the Sadducees -- the intellectual elites of their day  – and we see that even in Jesus’ time there were those who, even with the glorious witness of the seven brothers and their mother, (though it is said that the Sadducees did not accept anything other than the first five books of Scripture as authoritative), did not believe in the resurrection. They rejected the gift of true freedom which is rooted in eternal life.  It is a philosophy (not uncommon in our time) which binds us to only what we see and feel, and therefore, binds us to fear of losing those things. Fear enslaves all. God frees all who take refuge in Him. Jesus breaks through the superficial Scriptural interpretation of the Sadducees by showing them the truth that was always present in the Scriptures they dissect: God has made us to live eternally.

“even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called out 'Lord, '
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him all are alive."

 Contrasting the Sadducees weakness of faith (being so rooted in this world) with the faith of the seven, I guess, if you can't believe in something greater, the only thing you can do is ridicule what they died for. In the story, the seven brothers are tortured and executed one by one for not conforming to the king’s decrees to worship a god other than God. If the Sadducees really understood the story, they would have understood how ultimately free one is when the eternal God has been put first. When you really trust that you can hide in the shadow of His wings, not for temporal gain, but for eternal gain; the gain to behold His face.

It happened that seven brothers with their mother were arrested
and tortured with whips and scourges by the king,
to force them to eat pork in violation of God's law.

The king at that time was determined to abolish the Jewish faith by making it illegal to follow God’s laws and statutes. They could not legally offer pure worship to God! The obligation to violate God’s laws was enforced by terrifying displays of torture and execution! If the fear of losing worldly pleasure and comforts did not break devotion to our eternal God, then a more primal fear was invoked, fear of a tortuous death. Their highest hopes were to be placed in the powers of this world to keep them safe and sound, to preserve their lives. Fear was to rule over them.

"It is my choice to die at the hands of men
with the hope God gives of being raised up by him;”

Instead, the brothers and their mother placed their hope in the eternal; a reality more real than their earthly suffering. In doing so they were graced with the freedom to suffer all things, to not be reduced to their fear of pain and death, and thus to merit eternal life. Eternity is not for wimps!

…After him the third suffered their cruel sport.  He put out his tongue at once when told to do so, and bravely held out his hands, as he spoke these noble words:  "It was from Heaven that I received these; for the sake of his laws I disdain them; from him I hope to receive them again." Even the king and his attendants marveled at the young man's courage, because he regarded his sufferings as nothing

How horrifying! I am a wimp, I hate even reading about it! Yet, in this story of martyrdom, these young men and their mother demonstrate a hope beyond hope. They show us something that we already have an inkling of deep in our souls, but something that the “Sadducees” of the world are always trying to rationalize away: What we see -- even what we feel -- in this world is not all there is! This world is not the ultimate reality. It is not eternal. The young men refuse to allow their faith to be rationalized away…even under the threat of unfathomable torture. Enduring in this hope is a gift that we should pray to receive.

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.

It is true, the “Sadducees” around us are always trying to reduce our faith to strictly earthly terms i.e., our most real reality is to depend on governing structures that will give us lots of good stuff, lots of assurances of safety and protection. We are to fear losing our lives, we are to fear losing our looks, we are to fear being a nobody, we are to fear being rejected, we are to fear…. and we are to look to the world to assuage our fears. As we do that we are enslaved to them and reduced to finding our “happiness” in material comforts and in ourselves. I ask you, and myself again, are we truly free? Is your hope full of immortality?

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father,who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace,encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word.

I will leave you with this beautiful song "I Shall Not Want" by Audrey Assad which can be found on her newest album Fortunate Fall, it is a prayer that I think is appropriate for this post, enjoy!   Heidi

 

My Sheep Hear My Voice.

A reflection on the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 2013

Thereadings this Sunday call us to martyrdom; to witness in strength and love to the Lamb who shepherds us and fills us with His joy.  How do we gain the confidence of Paul and Barnabas to be a witness to the truth of the Gospel?

 

John: 10:27-30

Jesus said:  “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.  No one can take them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.  The Father and I are one.”

 Luke's drawing of him listening to Jesus

Do you know His voice?  How do you learn to hear his voice?  These were questions that came up in our recent Kyrion meeting.  Kyrion is a prayer group for children that we have at our parish.   We are a small group under the umbrella of One Heart~One Fire.  The format for our small but faithful group starts with praise of God in song, an opening prayer, then we read, discuss, act out, meditate and journal on the Gospel for the upcoming Sunday.  We end with prayer.  We are trying to ignite a love for the Father in the hearts of the children, and to lead their hearts to know His voice.  And we are faithful and obedient to the teachings of our Church.  She is our guide into the heart of Christ.  Yet, it is a tall order.  There is an initial discomfort among all the children.  Jesus sometimes says strange things, challenging things.  It may be easier to keep a safe distance.   Even the children perceive this and our culture encourages it.

And this stirs up a bit of nervousness.  Truly, If you were to walk into our room in the middle of one of our meetings you would see what may look like chaos, in fact, it often feels like chaos to me (especially if I happened to have my toddler, Max, along).  To our eyes the rambunctious children do not seem to be ready or able listen and hear the Word of the Lord.  But our eyes miss a lot.   It is hard to perceive the very small movements of God in the ordinary messiness of our daily lives.

After my first few, very, very, VERY noisy and rowdy Kyrion meetings this year, I was tempted to give in to the feeling that it really was not worth the effort on a Friday afternoon, when I would much rather go home and relax with my family after a long week.  After all, we went to Mass that day, we will pray our nightly decade of the Rosary with the children before they go to bed…what more do we need to do?  Yes, Mass and devotion to our Blessed Mother are foundational to this ministry, but God has shown me, through many different means, how dangerous the attitude of "I have done enough" can be.  It can seduce you to compartmentalize faith.  It can induce a complacency in our soul and - I think we can see this in our culture - this complacency reduces our ability to love others with the passionate and fiery love of Christ; with a love that witnesses His love.  We will become lukewarm.  We will not be able to perceive evil, we will be easily deceived and truth will be inverted.  Thus I persevere with our other families. I have learned, over the course of the years how much He can do with a little perseverance on my part.  I am learning to notice the still,  small movements of His Spirit which reveal that the sheep are listening.

Sophia's drawing of Jesus

In fact, on many Sundays, when the Gospel is read at Mass (or during the children’s liturgy he sometimes attends) my son Luke will comment on how we read that in Kyrion, or how he got to play the part of Jesus in that Gospel during Kyrion, or how he drew a picture of Jesus when we journaled on the Gospel.  He is engaged in the readings at Mass in a way that he would not otherwise be.  He is given permission to understand that the Word of God is written for him.  This is not selfish, it is learning to recognize the voice of the Lamb, the shepherd of His people.  In fact, it is giving him the courage to respond to His word in a way that will witness to others.   And he will need the courage; our children will need to know the voice of Jesus.  For some form of martyrdom awaits all of us who listen to and obey the shepherd’s voice, but we are assured that even if we suffer for His sake in this world the Father will not allow you to be lost.

I, John, had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race people, and tongue.  They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.  Then one of the elders said to me, “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.  “For this reason they stand before God’s temple.  The one who sits on the throne will shelter them.  They will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them.  For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of life-giving water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”  Rev 7:9, 14 B-17

So it is imperative that we learn to hear His voice!  We need to teach our children that He is always speaking to us.  In our meeting, we ran a simple game with our children.  They were each blindfolded, and we (their mothers) scattered around the room and all called to them.  They had to listen and discern where their parent was.  They all succeeded.  Why?  Because they live with us, because they communicate with us.  They have learned to know our voices for their own safety, and for their individual needs for nurturing and love.  We learn to hear His voice by living with Him every day, in His Word, in prayer, by frequently coming to Him in adoration, in the Sacraments, in repentance.   Do you know His voice?  You must or you will be lead astray. You must know His voice and be prepared;  because sometimes He asks His followers to do hard things.  To love impossible people.  To forgive unspeakable crimes.  To proclaim Him in terrifying situations.  But in Him you can endure times of great distress, and confidently rejoice that your will be worthy of everlasting life where God Himself will wipe away every tear.

We are His people the sheep of His flock!  Amen!  Alleluia!

Heidi 

Martyr/Martyrdom, by Mary Dwyer

Originally the word martyr meant witness.  The word “martyr,” from the Greek martus, literally means “a witness who testifies to a fact of which he has knowledge from personal observation.  The definition was used both in the secular world as well as in the Old and New Testament of the Bible.  (Trites) The process of bearing witness was not intended to lead to the death of the witness, although it is known from ancient writers [Josephus] that witnesses, especially of the lower classes, were tortured routinely before being interrogated as a means of forcing them to disclose the truth. (Wikipedia)

Most scholars consider the Hasmonean traditions preserved in Maccabees as representing the earliest Jewish strata of martyrology.  A definition of martyrdom that includes:

1.     public declaration of one’s allegiance to God and Torah in the face of official demands to betray that allegiance or die;
2. .      the perception that this act fulfills a religious mandate (that death is what God demands when the alternative is apostasy);
3. .      the passionate commitment of the adherent to both God and Torah;
4. .      these deaths serve a larger redemptive purpose, generally for Israel as a whole; AND
5. .      death [or near death experience of Isaac—as interpreted later—or Daniel]. (Lander)

 Jesus spoke of the time “from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah” [Lk. 11:51; Matt. 23:35] when referring to the martyrs of the Old Testament.  Since Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus was making a comprehensive statement covering the known Old Testament [Genesis—Chronicles].  (Vlach)

During the early Christian centuries, the term acquired the extended meaning of a believer who is called to witness for their religious belief, and on account of this witness, endures suffering and/or death. The death of a martyr or the value attributed to it is called martyrdom. (Wikipedia)   

The Catholic ideal of martyrdom is found in Christ’s words of the Gospel: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” [Mt 10:39]. (Curley)  Eventually the term “Christian martyr” became associated only with those who witnessed to Christ with their blood. (Encyclopedia) 

An example of Martyrs found in the Old Testament in which the witnesses did not die is the story of the three young men put into the fiery furnace by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar.  “He ordered the furnace to be heated seven times more than usual and had some of the strongest men in his army bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and cast them into the white-hot furnace. [Daniel 3:19-20] Their belief in God saved them.

The Maccabees martyr stories are probably the most well know of the Old Testament.  Because these books are found in the Septuagint and Deuterocanonical I think it is important to provide some information on the split between Jews and Catholics about the Maccabees books.  Lander’s writes that there is evidence in both Josephus and in the writings of fourth century church fathers that the Jews of Modin and Antioch revered the Maccabees martyrs at their tombs. That Jews at Antioch built a shrine which purportedly contained the bones of the Maccabees mother of the seven sons. Jews as well as Christians would visit this shrine seeking healing and other miracles, an intermingling evidenced at the shrines of other Biblical sites in the Greek east. 

What changed over the years creating the split on the tradition to the Maccabean Martyrs?  Landers noted that as Jewish and Christian identity became increasingly defined holy places became sites of contestation.  As Christians laid increasing claim to martyrs, martyrdom, and martyrologies, not to mention the frequency with which early Christian exegetes portrayed the Maccabean martyrs in particular as Jewish prefigurations of Jesus, Jews were less motivated to preserve these accounts as their own. Lander believes this is one of the reasons for the exclusion of the books of Maccabees from the Hebrew Bible.

The Maccabean Martyr stories express instances of martyrdom where citizens flaunting the restrictive religious measures imposed by King Antiochus Epiphanes.  These are witnesses who die for their religious belief and love of God.  Somewhat less well-know are the families massacred in witness to the law and to the Sabbath. First, those pursued and confronted by the officers and soldiers of the king into the desert “They said, ‘Let us all die without reproach; heaven and earth are our witnesses that you destroy us unjustly.’" [1 Mc 2:37].  Second there are the two mothers and their circumcised infants who are hurled from the city walls in public view. And third a group of secret Sabbath-observers are burned to death. [2 Mc 6:10-11].

More familiar are the martyrdoms of the elder scribe Eleazar and those of the pious mother and her seven sons. These witness stories are about observance of the law and the power of love for God.  The officials ask Eleazar to eat pork or to pretend to eat pork by eating his own legitimately [allowed by the Torah] meat. [2 Mc 6:21].  Eleazar defies the order and declares, “I will show myself worthy of my old age and set a noble example for the young of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.” [2 Mc 6.27-8]

A second, more famous, story is the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons. King Antiochus is the oppressor.  He brutally tortures each son in front of their mother and a large crowd. This story also connects to the promise of a life after death and therefore use by Catholic to demonstrate Jesus’s message of losing one’s life to gain life.  It is the testimony of the second son which first connects the death of martyrs to the promise of their resurrection, a claim repeated in the third and fourth son: “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever. It is for his laws that we are dying.” [2 Mc 7:9].

The fourth brother declares" It is my choice to die at the hands of men with the God-given hope of being restored to life by him; but for you, there will be no resurrection to life." firmly believing in God's promise of life. [2Mc 7:14]   (Hoagland)

Finally as Landers writes the mother is revered as a model of courage and faith, as she implores her children to resist the imperial demands for apostasy. The seventh son heeds her advice, proclaiming at his death, “I will not obey the king's command. I obey the command of the law given to our forefathers through Moses. [2 Mc 7:30].”

Copyright 2011, Mary Dwyer

Bibliography

Catholic Encyclopedia. 1917. Print.

Curley, Jim. "The Catholic Ideal of Martyrdom." Catholic Men’s Quarterly Spring 2005. Web.

Hoagland C.P., Victor. "On Martyrdom: Ignatius of Antioch and Bishop Bossilkov." Bread on the Waters Web Pages. Web. <http://www.cptryon.org/cpexams/bossilkov/vhcp.html>.

Lander, Shira. "Martyrdom in Jewish Traditions." Catholic-Jewish Consultation Committee Meeting. St. Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, MD. 11 Dec. 2003. Web. <http://www.bc.edu/research/cjl/meta-elements/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/Lander_martyrdom/index.html>.

"Martyr." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr>.

The New American Bible. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2002. Web. <http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.shtml>

Trites, Alison. "MartyrThe New Testament Concept of Witness." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr>.

Vlach, Michael J. "How Did the Old Testament Become the Old Testament?" TheologicalStudies.org. Web. <http://www.theologicalstudies.org/page/page/1572454.htm>.