Saturday of Week 11 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 6:24-34

Today we continue with Jesus’ teaching on our attitude to material and visible things. We have to make a choice between the vision of life that Jesus offers or a preoccupation with money and possessions. They are not compatible. They involve conflicting goals in life and different visions of what is most important in life. The truly materialistic person may have a veneer of Christian practice, but cannot be a really committed Christian and vice versa.

Jesus preaches what St Ignatius Loyola calls ‘indifference’ to material things. Obviously some material things—like food and clothing and shelter—are necessary to daily living. At different times other things will be necessary too.

The attitude of ‘indifference’ is not that one does not care; on the contrary, one cares very much. But one cares to have things and to use things only in so far as they are needed to love and serve God and others for his sake. Jesus urges us to liberate ourselves from worry and anxiety about our body and material things such as food and clothing.

To be concerned about food because right now I am very hungry and do not have any is very different from worrying whether I will have food next month; to be anxious about what is happening when I am in intensive care is very different from wondering how long my health will hold up in the coming years; to be fretting because I have no money to pay my rent with the landlord knocking at the door is very different from wondering whether I will ever be rich.

Worry and anxiety about the future are a waste of time and energy yet we indulge in them so much. We are invited to:

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Likewise, the flowers in the field—they do nothing except be themselves and God takes care of them. And how beautiful they are! When their time comes they pass away.

We are often so busy regretting the past or worrying about the future that we never get to enjoy life. Enjoyment and happiness are only in the present—nowhere else. If we keep looking forward or looking back we will never find happiness. And yet it is right here in our grasp at every moment of every day. As Jesuit Fr Tony de Mello has written:

“You have everything you need right now to be happy.”

How our lives would be transformed if only we could really believe that! Because happiness can only be in the now. Yesterday’s happiness is gone; tomorrow’s does not exist. If I am not happy now, I never will be.

So to follow the advice of Jesus today:

…do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

God is in the here and now and nowhere else. He is always available.

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Saturday of Week 11 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on 2 Chronicles 24:17-25

About this passage, the Vatican II Missal says:

“We turn today to Second Chronicles for a further unhappy episode in the history of Judah.  The zealous high priest Zechariah, son of the same Jehoiada who had saved King Joash, is murdered in the Temple area. Jesus referred to this sad story (see Matt 23:31).” 

Our reading is taken from the Second Book of Chronicles, but chronologically, it follows on the events of yesterday’s reading where we saw the young Joash, who had been rescued from certain death at the hands of his murderous grandmother, Athalia, and made king through the instrumentation of Jehoiada, the high priest.  Sadly however, as happens so often in these accounts, treachery again takes over.

When Jehoiada died, officials began to work on King Joash, who listened to what they had to say. As a result, the people of Judah began to abandon worship in the Temple and turned to various forms of idolatry. For this reason, “wrath [God’s anger] came upon Judah and Jerusalem”—the southern kingdom and its capital. The Hebrew word for ‘abandon’ or ‘forsake’ is repeated three times in the passage, indicating the reason for the divine punishment which follows. There are many similar examples in other parts of the Old Testament.

When prophets were sent to bring them back to their senses and to God’s ways, the people refused to listen.  Their rejection of these prophets was a rejection of Yahweh himself, thus sowing the seeds of the destruction to follow.

Then Zechariah, the son of the former high priest Jehoiada, was inspired to call the people back to the worship of Yahweh. He told them:

Because you have forsaken the Lord, he has also forsaken you.

But instead of listening to his appeals, they plotted against him and, at the orders of the king, stoned him to death right there in the Lord’s Temple—causing a terrible sacrilege to take place.

The blame is laid fairly and squarely on King Joash.  It was an extraordinary act of ingratitude to the son of the man who had rescued the king as a young child from the same fate.  As he died, Zechariah cried out:

May the Lord see and avenge!

The cry is a contrast to the words of Jesus on the cross and of Stephen before his martyrdom.  In the Old Testament, justice is often achieved through vengeance, and violence met with violence.  In the New Testament, violence is not the Way.

This cruel death is referred to indirectly by Jesus when, speaking to the Pharisees, he says:

Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets.
(Matt 23:31)

The retribution was not long in coming.  A year later an army of Aramaeans attacked King Joash and executed his officials, perhaps those very ones who had led him and the people astray to the worship of idols.

Although the Aramaean forces were not large in number, they were, by God’s power, able to overcome the much larger army of Joash and the Judeans, defeated for deserting their God. Just as God had helped the small army of Judah against overwhelming odds when the king and people were faithful to him (2 Chron 14:8-9; 2 Chron 20:2,12), so now in their unfaithfulness they are defeated by a much smaller force of invaders.

Joash was treated, in the thinking of the time, as his royal status deserved, but they left him a very sick man.  Finally, his own officers, the ones perhaps who had helped Jehoiada engineer the coup against Athalia, moved to avenge the death of the high priest’s son Zechariah, and murdered the king in his bed.  He was buried in the citadel of David, but not in the tombs of the kings. 

Once again, sin does not pay.

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