Monday of
the 26th Week of the Year
September
28, 2015 8:30am
Late Saturday afternoon, a young husband and father of three
girls had an apparent major heart attack and died.
This man’s wife was simply devastated.
Four of us just sat in a private room of the emergency room.
With such pain and grief, with tears and crying, there was
little to say.
But, we did pray.
It was one of those completely vulnerable, humanly helpless
moments.
All we could do was turn to God and cry out for help – to
get this family through one of the roughest possible human experiences.
It’s that kind of thing that today’s first reading
addresses.
The prophet Zechariah is speaking
around the year 515BCE – about 515 years before the birth of Christ.
The context is that the people of
Judah have been released from captivity in Babylon.
They are back home in Jerusalem
and feeling overwhelmed.
Their temple has been destroyed
and their country is in shambles.
They feel overwhelmed and
Zechariah, a holy man, a prophet, offers them encouragement and hope.
Notice in the passage that six
times Zechariah speaks of “The Lord of
hosts.”
That expression “The Lord of hosts” appears 284 times in
the Old Testament.
We use it in the Mass in the
acclamation at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts.”
This expression refers to the
forces of heaven, to God’s strength and power.
Zechariah is saying that God can
get things done.
He says today:
In fact, the people of Judah
built the second temple and it lasted for more than five hundred years until
the Romans destroyed it.
For us, the prophet’s message is
to rely on the power of God.
We need to entrust ourselves to
power of God especially when things seem beyond our power.
And maybe to prepare ourselves
for those moments, we need to entrust ourselves to the power of God each day,
every day.
It is with God’s power that we
can get through the dark tunnels of our human journey.
Here at Mass today, we entrust
ourselves to God’s power.
“Even if things seem impossible in the eyes of people, they are not
impossible in the eyes of God.”
We can find our hope there and
only there.
