Tuesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 504

In the lifetime of those kings
the God of heaven will set up a kingdom
that shall never be destroyed or delivered up to another people;
rather, it shall break in pieces all these kingdoms
and put an end to them, and it shall stand forever.

I once attended a workshop among Lutheran ministers. The speaker said to them, “You can ask any Catholic and he will tell you, ‘The Church is two thousand years old; the United States is only two hundred.”

“Guilty!” I replied. We have seen them rise and watched them fall: the Roman, Byzantine, Holy Roman, Spanish, Dutch, French, Russian, Islamic, Assyrian, Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Norman, Viking, Aztec, Incan, Mayan and countless others. The Word of God endures forever.

The Church, of course, is not an empire; it is only a loosely-organized institution sustained by the Holy Spirit and fed by the Word of God year after year, generation after generation. It has no life apart from God’s grace; needs constant reform; and is always on the verge of collapse. Membership is not for the faint of heart.

Our long memory gives us an extraordinary perspective and great responsibility. We can see through the absurd pretensions of our contemporaries. We know that gay marriage is an oxymoron and there is no divine right to own guns. We know that private ownership of property or wealth comes with grave responsibilities, especially to the less fortunate. We know that personal freedom is always contained by the rights and needs of the community. The very idea of rights, though based in revelation and the principle of human dignity, is a human construct.

Most importantly, we know that every human being and every human institution is subject to Judgment and “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe.” He is the “stone which was hewn from a mountain” which will shatter ever pretension:

...breaking them in pieces. The iron, tile, bronze, silver, and gold all crumbled at once, fine as the chaff on the threshing floor in summer, and the wind blew them away without leaving a trace. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.