CT - Catholic Telegraph

The worth of people found in worship of God

Fourth Sunday of Lent (B), II Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23. (Lectionary 032, March 26)

The two books of Chronicles are not the best known or the most quoted books of the Bible. Nor are they much used in the liturgy. In fact, this reading is the only time that either book of Chronicles is used for a Sunday reading throughout the three year cycle. For a long time, Catholic bibles entitled these two books the Books of Paralipomena, leftovers.

Yet Chronicles are far more than collections of otherwise unused material. They are an overview of all sacred history from Adam to the destruction of Jerusalem. They are a reworking of other books of the Bible (e.g., Samuel and Kings) plus the addition of other material. They present the history of salvation but from a slightly different religious perspective than the other books of the Bible.

Written about 400 B.C., i.e., after the exile, they teach that the greatness and worth of the people would no longer be found in political or economic power, but in the careful worship of God, in corporate reverence for the temple, in an ongoing consciousness of the people’s connection to David, the religious giant whose relationship with God set the pattern for the religious consciousness of all Israelites. The general theme of Chronicles is not messianic expectation but cultic exactitude. For the author of Chronicles, what was important was not the messianic savior still to come but the contemporary opportunities for relating to God in post-exilic Judah.

This Sunday’s reading is from the very end of The Second Book of Chronicles. Over the past Sundays, we have selections from the history of the growth of God’s relationship with human beings: Noah, Abraham, the law given to the people by Moses. Now we read about destruction, the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the political importance of God’s people.

As the lectionary presents the reading to us, it is in three parts. The first part deals with the immediate causes of the catastrophe. The leaders of the people, including the priests, neglected authentic temple worship. God sent spokesmen to them, like the prophet Jeremiah, but the leadership rejected and scoffed at them. Finally the situation had reached the point of no return. "There was no remedy."

In the second part of the reading, the text, in a few lines, tells of the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem itself. The Chaldeans (i.e., the Babylonians) then carried everybody of any consequence off into exile to help enrich their captors. Their exile would last as long as the Babylonian empire would exercise supremacy in what we call the middle east.

The author gives Jeremiah the last word. Jeremiah had prophesied that the land would be laid waste and would experience seventy years of inactivity, a kind of long sabbath consequent to the kingdom’s defeat. (Actually, the exile lasted from 587 to 538 B.C., fifty years rather than seventy. However, scholars point out that it was seventy years from the beginning of the exile to the rebuilding of the temple, and that the number seventy is often used to signify an indeterminately long period of time.)

Finally comes the beginning of the next period of the history of God’s people. The Persians unseat the Babylonians as the dominant power and their king, Cyrus, sends the exiles home to rebuild the temple. A new era begins.

As this text is presented to us here, we learn in just a few verses about some major turning points in the history of God’s relationship to His chosen people. Everything that was sacred and important to the Israelites — temple, city, economic resources, political independence - was taken away. Even the land that God had promised to Abraham was no longer theirs. And they had brought it all on themselves. Yet that wasn’t the end.

Out of the blue comes Cyrus the Persian, a pagan whom God used to bring the people back home. It is true that the Jews would never again be the political and social power that they had been in the good old days of David and Solomon. But God would be in touch with them in a new way. Rather than a people of large armies and vast areas of dominion, they would be a people whose uniqueness lay in their worship of God, a worship centered in the renovated temple, but rooted in the dedication to God proclaimed by religious giants like Moses and David. Catastrophe had yielded to hope.

This double turning point in the history of the Israelites — from independence to defeat, from defeat to restoration — teaches us that God always loves and cares for His people, even when the people are unfaithful, even when everything seems lost.

For Reflection and Discussion.

What have been the turning points of my life?

Where do I see hope in present day political and religious circumstances?