by Father James Rodriguez

If a chill runs down your spine during today’s first reading, then you were truly listening.

While it is sometimes easy to be distracted during Mass, this gripping story of the martyrdom challenges us all to greater faith. These seven brothers, with their mother, were arrested and tortured for their refusal to comply with their oppressors. It is a sad reality that even today, on our own shores as well as elsewhere, religious persecution runs rampant. Syria, Egypt and Nigeria are but a few of the places where innocent Christians are slaughtered on a near daily basis. American Christians are also suffering. All around us, despite the comforts we enjoy, there is a deep persecution that, as it has since the beginning, threatens to stamp out the flame of faith. What is to be our response, if in fact, we find the courage to respond? If it is not akin to the courage of these young men and their mother, then we have a lot of work to do.

Last year, the film “For Greater Glory” told the story of the Cristeros of Mexico in the 1930s. They were faithful people who risked their lives resisting government persecution. Many of them died acclaiming Christ as King, aware that as believers our sights must be set on the higher ideals of faith and freedom.

Martyrs like these are nearly always accompanied by companions who support them along the road to the true glory of witness. St. Paul, before giving his life in this way, encouraged others to do the same. In the face of persecution, he was there and prayed on their behalf. He reminded them that their pain had a purpose: that “the word of the Lord may speed forward and be glorified.” He prayed that they (and we) might have “the endurance of Christ,” to courageously defend our faith and win souls for the Savior.

Lest we think of martyrdom as a thing of the past, or a thing for other, more heroic people, it bears noting that it is an intrinsic part of every vocation.

When I was attending the seminary, one of our priest-professors had a sister who was dying. Because of the illness that was slowly claiming her life, she had trouble breathing. Her caretakers offered to ease her pain in her final moments, but she refused, choosing instead to offer her last pained breaths to God for us, the seminarians. This type of inspirational and redemptive suffering is something about which we do not hear nearly enough. It is a commendable and beautifully simple thing to “offer up” whatever small suffering we have to endure. Perhaps it is a loud neighbor, an unkind boss or a rude fellow commuter on the train. It can be an ache or pain, or simply skipping dessert once in a while, that we offer to the Lord, in humility and love for the sake of others.

It is precisely love and humility that are absent when the institutionalized bullying of persecution takes place. It targets people’s hope, crippling them through despair and reshaping them in the hideous image of the persecutor. In today’s Gospel, the Sadducees test Jesus, and with Him, anyone else who believed in the resurrection of the dead.

The Sadducees flatly denied the resurrection, and with it, the hope it entails, using a story about seven brothers and one bride, as if these were not people but objects. How often do we fall into the same trap – denying the dignity of our fellow humans to prove a point? How many governments and groups throughout history, in the name of politics and religion alike, have slaughtered the image and likeness of God and written it off as the collateral damage of an ideological war without end?

Jesus, the King of love, cuts through their politics and establishes a key aspect of Church law on marriage and celibate chastity. In heaven, He assures us, marriage is no longer necessary, for we are bound to each other in the purest joy imaginable, a joy that is itself mirrored in the union of one man, one woman and one God. In heaven, we will be as He intended us to be, shining like the Son.[hr]

Readings for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time

2 Maccabees 7: 1-2, 9-14

Psalm 17: 1, 5-6, 8, 15

2 Thessalonians 2:16 – 3:5

Luke 20: 27-38[hr]

Father James Rodriguez is the associate vocation director for the diocese and teaches at Cathedral Prep and Seminary, Elmhurst.