Friday of Week 26 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on Baruch 1:15-22
The Book of Baruch is one of the deutero-canonical (or ‘apochryphal’) books not found in the Hebrew or Protestant Bible. The Greek Bible puts it between Jeremiah and Lamentations, but the Vulgate has it immediately after Lamentations, where it is also found in our Catholic Bibles.
According to its introduction (see Bar 1:1-14), it was written in Babylon by Baruch after the deportation and sent to Jerusalem to be read at liturgical gatherings. The opening verses of this book ascribe it, or at least its first part, to Baruch, well-known as the secretary of the prophet Jeremiah. It contains five very different compositions, the first and the last in prose, the others in poetic form. The prose sections were certainly composed in Hebrew, though the earliest known form of the book is in Greek.
Today we have the first of two readings from the book. It is the beginning of what is called The Prayer of the Exiles, the exiles being those Jews who were deported to Babylon from Judah and Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century BC. As the passage seems to belong to a much later date, it may rather reflect the feelings of a later community who saw in their own situation a similarity with those exiles.
The author had begun his book by saying:
These are the words of the book that Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah son of Zedekiah son of Hasadiah son of Hilkiah wrote in Babylon, in the fifth year, on the seventh day of the month, at the time when the Chaldeans [Babylonians] took Jerusalem and burned it with fire.
(Bar 1:1-2)
The details he gives indicate the year 582 BC, probably in the fifth month—the anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem—which was doubtless commemorated among the exiles as it was in Palestine. Today’s passage is a general lament for the situation of the Israelites now living in exile, far from their homeland and from Jerusalem and its Temple, the home of Yahweh.
But there is no complaint against Yahweh for their condition. Their sufferings are due to one reason and one reason only—the people’s long history of not obeying the Lord and going their own way. This began from the days the Lord brought them out of Egypt right up to the present time:
We have disobeyed him and have not heeded the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in the statutes of the Lord that he set before us. From the time when the Lord brought our ancestors out of the land of Egypt until today, we have been disobedient to the Lord our God, and we have been negligent in not listening to his voice.
The writer compares the goodness and the integrity of God with that of his people. If they have suffered by being sent into exile, it is the result of their own sins and not the doing of the good God.
In our response to this reading we might reflect on how much of our own pain and misfortunes can be traced to our own behaviour, individually or corporately. It is so easy to blame God for our ills and use him as a scapegoat who will not strike back. But the first step in expressing our love of God must begin with a total acknowledgment of our own sinfulness.
Paradoxically, it is those who are most aware of their sinfulness who are closest to God—because an acknowledgment of sin is an awareness of a gap that needs to be closed. Those who deny their sin are the least likely to change and convert. But when we do suffer, the question to ask our God is not “Why me?”, but “What now?” How are we to turn this experience to a greater love of God and neighbour?
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Friday of Week 26 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 10:13-16
In today’s Gospel, we hear strong words from Jesus against towns where he had preached extensively—Chorazin, Bethsaida and especially Capernaum.
Chorazin is only mentioned twice in the Bible, here and in the parallel passage of Matthew (11:21). It was near the Sea of Galilee and probably between 3 and 4 km north of Capernaum. Bethsaida, the home of some of Jesus’ disciples, was on the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee. It had been built by Philip the Tetrarch, who called it ‘Julias’ after Julia, a daughter of the emperor Caesar Augustus. Capernaum, situated on the north shore of the lake, appears frequently in the Gospel narratives and was the centre from which Jesus did much of his missionary work. His work and preaching would have been most familiar to the people there.
Jesus says that if the gentile cities of Tyre and Sidon had witnessed all that Jesus had said and done in those towns of Palestine, they would have repented long ago—just as the pagan people of Niniveh had repented at the preaching of Jonah.
Tyre and Sidon were towns on the Phoenician coast, north of Palestine (Lebanon today). Jesus was said to have visited the area just once and only very briefly, so the people there did not have an opportunity to witness Jesus’ miracles or hear his preaching, unlike the people in the towns mentioned above.
And Jesus goes further. Addressing his disciples he says:
Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.
In other words, to listen to the messengers of Jesus is equivalent to listening to him personally—to reject those messengers is to reject Jesus and to reject God.
And in our own times, perhaps we should emphasise that those ‘messengers’ are not just bishops, priests and religious. They include all those who sincerely proclaim the gospel by their words and their lives.
It might be no harm then for each of us today to hear those warnings of Jesus addressed to ourselves. How well have we really responded to the call of Jesus in the Gospel? How open are we to hear that message coming to us from different kinds of people in our community? How committed are we to accepting, living and sharing that Gospel with others?
Might it be true to say that there are people in other parts of our world, our country, our society who, if they were given what we have been given, who heard what we hear, would respond much more generously than we have done?
There is never any room for complacency in our Christian life. Because we have been given so much, so much more is expected of us. As Jesus says elsewhere, we may be very surprised to see others, who never had an opportunity directly to hear the gospel, go before us into God’s Kingdom.
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