Memorial of Saint Perpetua and Saint Felicity, martyrs

Strozzi, Bernardo - c. 1635

The Healing of Tobit

The neighbors mocked me, saying to one another:
“He is still not afraid!
Once before he was hunted down for execution 
because of this very thing;
yet now that he has scarcely escaped,
here he is again burying the dead!”

On this ninth Monday of Ordinary Time we begin reading from the Book of Tobit. Unfortunately we won’t finish it since Lent begins on Wednesday. If you’ve not read it recently I’ll recommend it. It’s a wonderful book with likeable characters, a complicated plot that begins in grief and ends in happiness and a good moral.

And there is also the mystery of the dog. Pundits have pondered that dog for centuries.

The story is too complicated to lay it all out here. But I am fascinated by the political situation in which Tobit finds himself. It sounds dreadfully familiar.

Tobit is described as singularly courageous. At one time he brought his tithes from Israel to Jerusalem although the Israelite King Jeroboam tried to stifle that cult by setting up shrines in Israel. When the Assyrians overran Israel, Tobit was taken into exile, along with thousands of his people.

Under King Sennacherib the Assyrian government carried out a terrorist policy of murdering citizens and leaving their bodies to be discovered in public places. Tobit does not explain why they would do such a thing, but I don’t suppose such a policy is ever rational. The pious exile buried the Jews who were murdered by government thugs.

Just as things seem to have taken a turn for the better – Sennacherib has died and his son Esarhaddon seems more peaceful -- and Tobit is enjoying both prosperity and better prospects, another corpse turns up in the street. The good man instinctively buries the dead without considering how much his piety has already cost him.

And then, to make matters worse, the punishment for his virtue seems to come not from the Assyrian overlords but from his own God! Tobit’s neighbors mock him, he goes blind, he quarrels with his wife, and he falls into sullen depression.

Tobit’s plight should sound familiar to us. In the last century we have witnessed the officially-sanctioned “disappearance” of millions of people in Germany, Russia, Turkey, Argentina and many other countries. These murders have occurred on every continent except Antarctica, and continue today in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

And good people still courageously practice their faith under these appalling circumstances. I remember the women in Argentina who protested in the streets for several years, demanding to know where their sons, husbands and brothers were buried. Entering the Season of Lent, we should steel ourselves with Lenten practices. If our faith is never tested by such dreadful circumstances, we might at least hope to be found worthy of the company of The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Tobit and his 21^st century heirs.