Homily for Tuesday, Week 34 of Ordinary Time

Homily for Tuesday
34th Week of Ordinary Time

Nov. 25, 2025
Dan 2: 31-45
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph Residence, N.R.

Nebuchadnezzar's court (Bible Art)

“The wind blew them away without leaving a trace” (Dan 2: 35).

Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s vision to show how transient are the empires of the world.  Only the power of God lasts forever.

The Jews had experienced Babylon’s might and been crushed by it.  They knew what worldly power could do and was doing even as this prophetic book was being composed.  They also knew that Babylon had given way to other passing empires.  When Daniel was being written, they were suffering under the last kingdom of the vision, that of King Antiochus of Syria, descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals—a kingdom so fragile that it tried to prop itself up with marriage alliances.

The Jews, in their tribulation under this Greek kingdom, some of which we heard in last week’s readings, looked to God for help:  “the stone hewn from the mountain without a hand being put to it” (2:45), an allusion perhaps to God’s holy mountain, Mt. Zion.  That stone smashed into fine dust all the earthly powers.  Perhaps the final composer of Daniel expected the Maccabees to be God’s final intervention for Israel’s salvation.

That, we know, didn’t happen.  But God has made a final, decisive intervention to save his people, viz., Jesus Christ, “the stone rejected by the builders that has become the cornerstone” (Acts 4:11)—cornerstone not of a single building but of the entire new Jerusalem, the holy city that fills the whole earth (2:35).  In Christ, “the God of heaven [has] set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed or delivered up to another people” (2:44), a kingdom that ends the reign of sin, a kingdom whose people we are blessed to belong to.