Monday of the Second Week of Ordinary Time – Odd Year
Posté par diaconos le 18 janvier 2021
Can you make the wedding guests fast ?
# The prophet Jeremiah was the son of Hilkiah, a priest in Anathoth, in the land of Benjamin, a few kilometres north of Jerusalem. Jeremiah proved to the Israelites the veracity of his dreams after an altercation with another prophet named Hananiah in the 6th century BC. Thus Jeremiah announced the death of Hananiah for the coming year because his prophecies were not divine and he attracted the wrath of God.
Indeed, Hananya died in the seventh month of that year. Jeremiah was a loner whose mission forced him to stay away from society, a situation from which he suffered. Moreover, Jeremiah had no wife. He was also imprisoned, brutalized, and exiled to Egypt to Taphnis. Jeremiah announced the arrival of the Chaldeans and foretold the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Judeans to Babylon because of their lack of faith. He encouraged the reformation of Josiah and tried to stop the progress of idolatry. Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of many foreign peoples, kingdoms and cities, including Dedan, Tema, Buz…
From the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark
At that time, as the disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees were fasting, they came to ask Jesus : « Why, while the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, are your disciples not fasting ? »
Jesus said to them : « Can the wedding guests fast while the Bridegroom is with them ? As long as they have the Bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the Bridegroom will be taken away from them, and on that day they will fast.
No one mends an old garment with a new piece of cloth ; otherwise the new piece added pulls on the old cloth and the tear becomes larger. Or else no one puts new wine into old wineskin s; for then the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins will be lost. New wine, new wineskins. » (Mk 2, 18-22)
Jeremiah recalled the voice of his groans.
The prophet Jeremiah, to give a moving expression to the sorrow of his people taken captive in Babylon, recalled that the voice of his groaning was heard northward as far as Ramah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin, on the mountains of Ephraim : « And she sat under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her to be judged. « (Jer 4, 5)
With a symbolism full of poetry and truth, Jeremiah personified all the Israelite mothers in the mother of the tribe, all their sorrows in his sorrows, but it was to console them by adding : « Thus said the Lord: Hold back your voice from weeping and your eyes from shedding tears, for your work shall have its reward, and they shall return from the land of the enemy » (Jg 31, 16) This was the beautiful thought that Matthew the Evangelist recalled when he made Rachel the type of Bethlehemite mothers who wept for their children who had been slaughtered by the tyrant.
These were the children of Rachel, the mother of the whole tribe of Benjamin, who died in Bethlehem, where she was buried : « And they journeyed from Bethel ; and there was yet a distance to Ephratah when Rachel gave birth. And it was sore for her, and the midwife said to her : « Do not be afraid, for you still have a son. And it came to pass, when she was about to die, that she called his name Ben-oni; but his father called his name Benjamin. And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephratah, which is Beth-lehem. « (Gen 35, 13-19)
No prophecy is fulfilled, alas ! More rigorously than the voice of our sorrows that resounds from century to century. Herod died shortly after the murder recounted here, of a horrible illness, an object of disgust for all those who approached him, with despair in his soul and a heart full of dreadful plans for revenge : « Nevertheless he did not succeed in deceiving his aunt, who had guessed it a long time ago and no longer let herself be fooled by him, having already fought against his evil designs by every possible means. Yet his daughter was married to Antipater’s maternal uncle who, by his calculations and manoeuvres, had got him to marry this young woman, previously married to Aristotle. Salome’s other daughter was the wife of the son of Alexas, Salome’s husband. But the alliance no more prevented Salome from penetrating Antipater’s evil designs than the ties of kinship had previously stopped her in her hatred of Aristobulus (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVII, 8 and 9).
After Herod’s death, Augustus divided his kingdom between the three surviving sons of the tyrant : Archelaus, for his part, had Judea, Idumea and Samaria, and the title of ethnarch, with the promise of royalty, if he satisfied the emperor with his administration : « Then, having changed his mind, he rewrote his will…: in Antipas, to whom he had first left the crown, he gave the tetrarchies of Galilee and Perea ; Archelaus obtained the royalty: his son Philip, the legitimate brother of Archelaus, had Gaulonitide, Trachonitide, Batanea and Panias as tetrarchy ; Iamné, Axotos and Phasaelis were attributed to his sister Salome with five hundred thousand drachmas of silver coin. He also provided for the rest of his parents and enriched each of them with bequests of capital and income. To the emperor he gave ten million silver drachmas and, in addition, gold and silver tableware and fabrics of great value ; to Julia, the emperor’s wife, and a few others, he distributed five million drachmas. He had reigned for thirty-four years since the execution of Antigone and thirty-seven years since his designation by the Romans as a man of equal cruelty to all, yielding to anger and rebelling against justice, he enjoyed an unequalled fortune : from a private individual he became king and, although surrounded by innumerable dangers, escaped from all and reached a very advanced age. But as for his family affairs and his relations with his sons, if, in his opinion, he was favoured by fate, since he regarded them as his enemies and managed to triumph over them, in my opinion he was profoundly unhappy. (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVII, 8,1). But after nine years of reign, he was exiled for his cruelties to Vienna, in the Gauls, where he died (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVII, 13, 2; War of the Jews, II, 7, 3). Joseph’s fear of coming to live in his states was therefore not unfounded. God put an end to his hesitations by showing him the new resolution he had to make.
This was the fourth revelation that Joseph received in a dream-vision during the long course of his painful experiences. As he had made this plan, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said : « Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary, your wife, into your home, for the child that is born in her comes from the Holy Spirit » (Mt 1, 20). This is a great stumbling block for those who cannot reconcile God’s intervention in our lives with the preconceived ideas of their philosophical systems.
As for those who believe in the living and true God, who does what is pleasing to him in heaven and on earth, they will consider, on the one hand, Joseph’s deep concern for the sacred repository entrusted to his care, a concern that urged him and his pious companion to seek help and guidance from on high through ardent prayers; on the other hand, the sovereign importance attached to the preservation of Jesus’ life. It is because of him that God reveals himself to his adoptive father in this way.
The real miracle here is the presence on our earth of the One who will be called the Son of God and the Son of Man ; all the rest is only the radiance of his appearance in the midst of our humanity. As for the nature of these dream revelations, which three times also took place through an angel of the Lord and which seemed to belong to the economy of the Old Testament rather than to that of the New, it would be odd to try to realise this through psychological analogies. In every manifestation of God to man, the how escapes us.
Joseph may have wished, for various reasons, to return to Judea, to Bethlehem, where a particular circumstance had brought him for a moment, where the child was born and where he was attracted by so many wonderful things that took place there. He renounced them, withdrew to Galilee, where Jesus had been brought up, and returned to Nazareth, where he and Mary had lived before : « When they had completed all that the law of the Lord commanded, they returned to Galilee, to their city of Nazareth. « (Lk 2:39).
Deacon Michel Houyoux
Links to other Christian Web sites
◊ The Tribulations of Jeremiah : click here to red the paper → The Tribulations of Jeremiah – Simply Bible
◊ Sovereign Grace church : click here to red the paper → Sermon: When the Bridegroom is With Them
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