Homily for Thursday
33d Week of Ordinary Time
Nov. 20, 2025
1 Macc 2: 15-29
Luke 19: 41-44
Christian Brothers, St.
Joseph Residence, N.R.
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| Christ wept over Jerusalem (Enrique Simonet, 1892) |
“Let everyone who’s zealous for the Law and who stands by the covenant follow after me” (1 Macc 2: 27).
They say that one
man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Mattathias and his sons, who became known as
the Maccabees, rebelled against the religious persecution we’ve been reading
about this week. In a different context,
we’d call them jihadists.
As for their zeal for
the Law and the divine covenant, they were the ancestors of the Pharisees, who
by and large—despite their reputation in the Gospels—were good men who really
tried to observe the Law in their daily lives but had the bad fault of
condemning ordinary people who weren’t, or couldn’t be, as observant as they
were. (Their kin are legion today in
social media.)
Jesus clashed with
the Pharisees. His zeal for the Law and
his love for the holy city took a different approach to daily life. He sympathized with the real struggles of
ordinary Jews, ordinary people of any kind who tried to do what was right and
sometimes failed or ran into obstacles—people like a Roman centurion (Matt 8:5-13),
a pleading Phoenician mother (Mark 7:24-30), or Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10).
Jesus was God’s
visitation. Those who recognized him and
his way of being zealous for the Law, i.e., for God, were saved and are still
being saved today from enemies that try to encircle their hearts and hem them
in (cf. Luke 19:43) with vice or with discouragement. In our zeal for the Law and the covenant, the
new covenant in Jesus’ blood (Luke 22:20), we can’t do better than to follow
him.
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