Monday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
November 20, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/112023.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we enter the liturgical year’s final two weeks. Our companions from the Hebrew Scriptures will be the Maccabees and Daniel. Our New Testament companion will continue to be the eloquent Luke.

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The singular virtue proclaimed through the Books of Maccabees and Daniel is this: FAITHFUL ENDURANCE. As we approach the “end times” of our Liturgical Year, the Church is reminding us to pursue and value this virtue in our own lives.

Anthiochos – Michel Francois DandrE Bardon
(Anthiochos IV Epiphanes Orders the Massacre of the Maccabees)

In today’s passage from Maccabees, we read about King Antiochus Epiphanes’s sacrilegious enculturation of the Israelites in an attempt to gain civil appeasement and material prosperity. Antiochus was a mean and bad guy. Likely because he felt his power threatened by them, he tried – in the vilest of ways – to suppress the Jews and their religious culture. The Book of Maccabees is the story of Jews who stood up to the suppression.

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In our Gospel, Jesus meets a blind person who pleads with him, “Lord, please let me see!”. Jesus restores the person’s vision with the assurance that faith has wrought the miracle. In other words, the blind person already “saw” in a deeper way because of faith. That faith offered the insight to engage Jesus’s Divine Power for complete healing.

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Because of their profound faith, the Maccabees could see through the king’s faithless campaign. They could endure ruthless persecution to remain faithful to the God they believed in.

Few of us will meet the kind of physical persecution for the faith endured by the Maccabees. But throughout our lives, our fidelity will be ruthlessly tested by our culture. We will continually be tempted to compromise our faithful practice for the sake of convenience, appeasement, material prosperity, or advantage over others.

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And so often we are blind to these enculturations. We become insensitive or indifferent to the injustices and fallacies of our culture and how they might be affecting our attitudes, choices, and behavior.

As we journey with the Maccabees, Daniel, and Luke over these two weeks, let’s pray for clear vision and courageous action around the profound sacrileges of our times: war, violence, irreverence for life, exaltation of gun culture, economic domination, immigration injustice, and the many systemic “isms” by which we marginalize our sisters and brothers.

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Prayer: Our Responsorial Psalm today offers a powerful plea to be delivered from the culture of death so predominant in our world:

R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Indignation seizes me because of the wicked
who forsake your law.
R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Though the snares of the wicked are twined about me,
your law I have not forgotten.
R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Redeem me from the oppression about me,
that I may keep your precepts.
R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
I am attacked by malicious persecutors
who are far from your law.
R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Far from sinners is salvation,
because they seek not your statutes.
R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
I beheld the apostates with loathing,
because they kept not to your promise.
R. Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.

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Music: For What It’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield