The Resurrection of Change: The Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

  The Resurrection of Change:

The Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

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November 10, 2019

2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; Psalm 17; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38

When Christians speak of death, we speak of life. Even after the Resurrection of Jesus, debate ensued between the Sadducees and Pharisees about whether Jesus really rose from the dead because no one fully understood what happens during a resurrection. Even if it happened to Jesus, what does it hold for a believer that professes that our bodies will rise to new life with Christ on the last day? What we do know is that death must occur.

         The Maccabean brothers believed that God would raise the faithful to heaven as they went to their brutal deaths. Their tormentors, those who do not believe in God, cannot be saved. The Pharisees hoped in the possibility of the resurrection as well, and the Sadducees vehemently denied it. No one really knows what happened to Jesus of Nazareth when he was resurrected to our Christ. We as Christians believe that we will enter into eternal life with Christ and will begin a new phase of life with God, and it is very consoling to hear these words during times of funerals. The questions linger as we hope in God as we contemplate our own mortality.

         The Sadducees was the ruling religious elite within Judaism. They were men of wealth and high social status and their members were often drawn from the priesthood. They held seats on the Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme court, and, like most ruling bodies, they had conservative political and religious views. They were strict constructionists to the Mosaic Law, and they were in opposition to the Pharisees who held looser interpretations of the unwritten customs and traditions. The Sadducees worked with the Romans to assure peace, and they were enmeshed in their business dealings, which consolidated their authority. They oversaw the running of the Temple as a religious center, civic, and financial center, and their decisions served their own interests more than they benefitted the ordinary Jewish citizen. After the Jewish revolt in 70 A.D., Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. With the people in dispersion, the Sadducees and the existing social structure had no further reason to exist and they simply disappeared.

         The death of the Maccabean brothers inspired many others to witness to the faith, like martyrs. The demise of the Sadducees allowed a new expression of the faith to occur. We have challenges to our faith, and we have to decide how to respond to the signs of the times. Are we supposed to fight the changes that alter our understanding of the faith, or are we somehow move in a new way that is uncomfortable for us, even if it seems to be challenges our long-held assumptions? The church is going through significant changes this current day. The meeting of bishops to discuss church life in the Amazon may alter the paradigms we hold about how church ought to be. They recommend three changes: (1.) in order to feed many Catholics with the Eucharist, the church can ordain older married men of proven virtues and may reopen the diaconate to women, (2.) the church may change liturgies and ways of worshipping that may seem foreign to our inherited European model because indigenous people express themselves differently, and (3.) every nation in the world is called to sacrifice their consumeristic ways to better honor the environmental challenges before us. Some will fight these changes and hold to a hard line because it is what they know and it is where they find comfort, and some will keep asking questions to understand that in embracing these changes, we do not lose Christ, though Church as we know it will be different.

How do you internally respond to these proposed changes? It is best to open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit and let the Spirit inform our consciences because these new realities may be unsettling. It comes back to the original question: Do you believe in the Resurrection, which only occurs after death? No one likes thoughts about death, but when we Christians speak of death, we speak of life. Are we being invited into a new death and resurrection?

Scripture for Daily Mass

First Reading: 

Monday: (Wisdom 1) Love justice, you who judge the earth; think of the Lord in goodness and seek him in integrity of hear.

Tuesday: (Wisdom 2) God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made them. But by the envy of the Devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it.

Wednesday: (Wisdom 6) Terribly and swiftly shall he come against you, because judgment is stern for the exalted–For the lowly may be pardoned out of mercy.

Thursday: (Wisdom 7) n Wisdom is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, Manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain, Not baneful, loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly, Firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing, And pervading all spirits, though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle.

Friday (Wisdom 13) All men were by nature foolish who were in ignorance of God, and who from the good things seen did not succeed in knowing him who is, and from studying the works did not discern the artisan.

Saturday (Wisdom 18) When peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful word, from heaven's royal throne bounded, a fierce warrior, into the doomed land, bearing the sharp sword of your inexorable decree.

Gospel: 

Monday: (Luke 17) "Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the one through whom they occur.  It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.

Tuesday: (Luke 17) "Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here immediately and take your place at table'?

Wednesday (Luke 17) As he was entering a village, ten lepers met him. They stood at a distance from him and raised their voice, saying, "Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!" And when he saw them, he said, "Go show yourselves to the priests."

Thursday (Luke 17) "The coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, 'Look, here it is,' or, 'There it is.' For behold, the Kingdom of God is among you."

Friday (Luke 17) "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man; they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Saturday (Luke 18) Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily.

Saints of the Week

November 10: Leo the Great, pope and doctor (d. 461) tried to bring peace to warring Roman factions that were leaving Gaul vulnerable to barbarian invasions. As pope, he tried to keep peace again - in particular during his meeting with Attila the Hun, whom he persuaded not to plunder Rome. However, in Attila's next attack three years later, Rome was leveled. Some of Leo's writings on the incarnation were influential in formulating doctrine at the Council of Chalcedon.

November 11: Martin of Tours, bishop (316-397), became an Roman soldier in Hungary because he was born into a military family. After he became a Christian, he left the army because he saw his faith in opposition to military service. He settled in Gaul and began its first monastery. He was proclaimed bishop in 371 and worked to spread the faith in at time of great uncertainty and conflict. He divided sections of his diocese into parishes.

November 12: Josaphat, bishop and martyr (1580-1623) was a Ukranian who entered the Basilian order and was ordained in the Byzantine rite. He was named the archbishop of Polotsk, Russia and attempted to unite the Ukrainian church with Rome. His opponents killed him. He is the first Eastern saint to be formally canonized.

November 13: Francis Xavier Cabrini, religious (1850-1917) was an Italian-born daughter to a Lombardy family of 13 children. She wanted to become a nun, but needed to stay at her parents’ farm because of their poor health. A priest asked her to help work in a girls’ school and she stayed for six years before the bishop asked her to care for girls in poor schools and hospitals. With six sisters, she came to the U.S. in 1889 to work among Italian immigrants. She was the first American citizen to be canonized.  

November 13: Stanislaus Kostka, S.J., religious (1550-1568) was a Polish novice who walked from his home to Rome to enter the Jesuits on his 17^th birthday. He feared reprisals by his father against the Society in Poland so we went to directly see the Superior General in person. Francis Borgia admitted him after Peter Canisius had him take a month in school before applying for entrance. Because of his early death, Kostka is revered as the patron saint of Jesuit novices.

November 14: Pedro Arrupe, S.J., Superior General (1917-1991) was the 28^th Superior General of the Jesuits. He was born in the Basque region of the Iberian Peninsula. He is considered one of the great reformers of the Society because he was asked by the Pope to carry out the reforms of Vatican II. November 14^th is the commemoration of his birth.

November 14: Joseph Pignatelli, S.J., religious and Superior General (1737-1811) was born in Zaragosa, Spain and entered the Jesuits during a turbulent era. He was known as the unofficial leader of the Jesuits in Sardinia when the Order was suppressed and placed in exile. He worked with European leaders to continue an underground existence and he was appointed Novice Master under Catherine the Great, who allowed the Society to receive new recruits. He secured the restoration of the Society partly in 1803 and fully in 1811 and bridged a link between the two eras of the Society. He oversaw a temperate reform of the Order that assured their survival.

November 15: Albert the Great, bishop and doctor (1200-1280), joined the Dominicans to teach theology in Germany and Paris. Thomas Aquinas was his student. With his reluctance, he was made bishop of Ratisbon. He resigned after four years so he could teach again. His intellectual pursuits included philosophy, natural science, theology, and Arabic language and culture. He applied Aristotle's philosophy to theology.

November 16: Roch Gonzalez, John del Castillo, and Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J. (1576-1628) were Jesuit priests born to Paraguayan nobility who were architects of the Paraguayan reductions, societies of immigrants based on religious faith. They taught the indigenous population how to plant farms and other basic life skills that would protect them from the insidious slave trades of Spain and Portugal. By the time the Jesuits were expelled, 57 such settlements were established. Roch was a staunch opponent of the slave trade. He, John, and Alphonsus were killed when the envy of a local witch doctor lost his authority at the expense of their growing medical expertise.  

November 16: Margaret of Scotland (1046-1093) was raised in Hungary because the Danes invaded England. She returned after the Norman Conquest in 1066 and sought refuge in Scotland. She married the king and bore him eight children. She corrected many wayward abuses within the church and clarified church practices.

November 16: Gertrude the Great (1256-1302) was placed for childrearing into a Benedictine monastery at age 5 in Saxony. She lived with two mystics named Mechthild and as she developed her intellectual and spiritual gifts, she too became a mystic. Her spiritual instructions are collected into five volumes. She wrote prayers as a first advocate of the Sacred Heart.

This Week in Jesuit History

·      Nov 10, 1549. At Rome, the death of Paul III, to whom the Society owes its first constitution as a religious order.

·      Nov 11, 1676. In St James's Palace, London, Claude la Colombiere preached on All Saints.

·      Nov 12, 1919. Fr. General Ledochowski issued an instruction concerning the use of typewriters. He said that they could be allowed in offices but not in personal rooms, nor should they be carried from one house to another.

·      Nov 13, 1865. The death of James Oliver Van de Velde, second bishop of the city of Chicago from 1848 to 1853.

·      Nov 14, 1854. In Spain, the community left Loyola for the Balearic Isles, in conformity with a government order.

·      Nov 15, 1628. The deaths of St Roch Gonzalez and Fr. Alphonsus Rodriguez. They were some of the architects of the Jesuit missions in Uruguay and Paraguay.

·      Nov 16, 1989. In El Salvador, the murder of six Jesuits connected with the University of Central America together with two of their lay colleagues.