Gospel: November 28, 2023
(Tuesday)
34th Week in Ordinary Time
Psalter: Week 2 / (Green)
Responsorial Psalm: Dn 3: 57, 58, 59, 60, 61
Give glory and eternal praise to him.
1st Reading: Daniel 2: 31-45
In your vision you saw a statue—very large, very bright; terrible to look at. Its head was of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. As you watched, a rock cut from a mountain, but not by human hands, struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay; smashing them. All at once the iron, clay, bronze, silver and gold crumbled into pieces, as fine as chaff on the threshing floor in summer. The wind swept them off and not a trace was left. But the rock that struck the statue became a great mountain that filled the whole earth.
That was the dream. Now the interpretation. You, O king, are king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given dominion, strength, power and glory, and into whose hand he has placed humankind, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, making you ruler over them. You are that head of gold.
After you, another kingdom, inferior to yours, will rise. Then a third kingdom, of bronze, will rule the whole world. Last shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron; and just as iron breaks and crushes everything else, so will it break and smash all the others. The partly clay and partly iron feet and toes mean that it will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron, just as you saw iron mixed with clay. And as the toes were partly iron and partly clay, the kingdom will be partly strong and partly weak. Just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, the people will be a mixture but will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
In the time of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom, never to be destroyed or delivered up to an other people. It will crush all those kingdoms and put an end to them; and it will endure forever. This is the meaning of your vision of a rock cut from a mountain not by human hands; the rock, which struck the statue and broke into pieces the iron, bronze, clay, silver and gold. The great God has shown the king what will happen in the future. The dream is true and its interpretation reliable.”
Gospel: Luke 21: 5-11While some people were talking about the temple, remarking that it was adorned with fine stonework and rich gifts, Jesus said to them, “The days will come when there shall not be left one stone upon another of all that you now admire; all will be torn down.” And they asked him, “Master, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?”
Jesus said, “Take care not to be deceived, for many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he; the Messiah the time is near at hand!’ Do not follow them. When you hear of wars and troubled times, don’t be frightened; for all these things must happen first, even though the end is not so soon.”
And Jesus said, “Nations will fight each other and kingdom will oppose kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and plagues; in many places strange and terrifying signs from heaven will be seen.
Reflection: “Christ is our hope.”
In what do we ground our hope? The first reading shows how shaky it is to trust in kings and secular power. Their kingdoms come and go, rising and falling over time, one replacing another. No earthly kingdom can last. the Gospel points out that not even the temple will last forever. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed a few decades after Jesus’ Resurrection, something Luke’s readers would have known. Jesus even tells his followers that they cannot rely on the reports of the people around them, lest they be deceived.
If we cannot ground our hope in political power, religious structures, or the people around us, in what can we ground our hope? Only in Christ. For Christ is our hope, a hope that cannot be destroyed or deceive us. We hope in Christ because in his passion, death, and Resurrection he destroyed death. He has defeated sin and death to give us reason to hope in eternal life. Thus, as Pope Benedict taught, “One who has hope lives differently.”
