CT - Catholic Telegraph

Jesus proclaimed what He knew to be true

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Wisdom 2:12, 17-20

When the Book of Wisdom was written in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first century B.C., the main issue facing the Jews was not liberation from slavery or the hostility of the Philistines or the burdens of Babylonian exile. It was the relationship between observant Jews who strove to follow the law of God and others who looked on such religious observance as ridiculously old fashioned and irrelevant. These others were not just pagan Greeks, but also, perhaps mainly, Hellenist Jews who had bought into the culture of their time and place.

To such up-to-date persons, philosophically and socially sophisticated, their fellow Jews who held on to the old-time religion of their fathers were not only outdated but also embarrassing. The old-timers, eccentric and set apart, claiming to be specially chosen by God, claiming to have access to the wisdom of God, were not people whom the sophisticates looked on with kindness or reverence. On the contrary, the apparently retrograde religion and philosophy of pious Jews constituted a challenge to the modern mind set of those who had espoused the ideas and way of life of the Greeks. But what the faithfulness of the observant Jews offered was more than a challenge. It was also an accusation, an accusation of faithlessness.

In this Sunday's reading, we see the reaction of the sophisticates to the challenge and the accusation offered by the dedication of the faithful Jews. We are in the second chapter of the Book of Wisdom. The first chapter offers a description of authentic wisdom. Now, in chapter two, we see the reaction of those who do not accept such wisdom. Their approach is to deride and persecute the virtuous man to test the depth of his beliefs.

"Let's give him a hard time and see how he holds up. His posture of righteousness is an accusation to us, a reproach for our lack of observance of the teachings of Moses. If we make him suffer, we will find out just how sincere he is. He claims that God will take care of him. Let's see if that is really so."

This reading offers an overture to the Gospel reading (Mark 9:30-37). There we see Jesus, for the second time, predicting the sufferings that He knew lay ahead of Him. Jesus was the wise man, par excellence, the Servant of God foreseen by Isaiah. He knew what He could expect. He was not mistaken. What the Book of Wisdom spoke of as the fate of the faithful servant of God would come to pass in the life, suffering and death of Jesus. In fact, the Gospel of Matthew (27:43) shows us the enemies of Jesus deriding Him, in the words of this passage from Wisdom, as He hung on the cross: "He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if He wants Him."

The central feature of our redemption through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is not the fact that He suffered so intensely. It is rather that Jesus was faithful. Because of Jesus' dedication to the Father, He roused the animosity of the religious leaders of His time. They saw His dedication to the will of the Father as somehow excessive, idiosyncratic, eccentric, dangerous.

Jesus could have watered down His teachings. He could have proclaimed a heavenly Father who was less loving, less forgiving, less merciful, a Father more along the lines of what Jesus' contemporaries in religious leadership would have been more comfortable with. But Jesus didn't do that. He proclaimed and He exemplified what He knew to be true, and His enemies hated Him for it. They saw Him as a posturer, intent on making them look bad. So they took their cue from the Book of Wisdom and "beset the just one ... put Him to the test ... condemned Him to a shameful death." If Jesus had not been consistent and faithful and dedicated to the will of His Father, He would not have had to undergo the shame and the sufferings foreseen for the just one in God's word.

We live in a world in which Catholic Christian values are not generally prized or respected. God's teaching about the meaning of our human existence, about marriage and sexuality, about the inviolability of human life, about justice, about our responsibility for the moral quality of our lives, God's teaching about all these matters and others is not accepted by most of the world around us. And those who espouse such teachings are not respected, either. We are looked upon as old fashioned, eccentric, out of touch. We may not be destined for "revilement and torture," but that doesn't mean that everybody looks on us kindly.

For reflection and discussion

How do virtuous people suffer persecution today?

In what ways and for what reasons have I suffered scorn and derision for my beliefs?