Thursday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 452

Herod the tetrarch heard about all that was happening, and he was greatly perplexed….

Since the middle ages, Herod Antipas has often been staged as a fool; a stupid, powerful buffoon to amuse the audience. He appeared that way most recently in the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, with an additional suggestion of homosexuality. That comic tradition relies on the gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Mark, which describe Herod as superstitious and frightened. He supposed that Jesus was a resurrected John the Baptist whom he had executed during a drunken banquet. 

Today's gospel, from Saint Luke, takes Herod more seriously. He is perplexed but not given to superstitious conspiracies, and that makes him dangerous.

Perplexed: the word comes from a French root for tangled or snared. The tyrant doesn’t know which way to go or what to make of Jesus. We can recognize his problem by the way society in general hears the Gospel. They really get into Christmas but have no interest whatever in a God who is born in poverty and pursued by murderers into Egypt. A powerless God seems oxymoronic. A Christmas sermon about silence, darkness, and poverty would only perplex them. And that could be dangerous.

Today’s first reading introduces the short, fascinating, and sometime depressing book of Ecclesiastes, which was written by a wise man known as Qoheleth. Many generations of Jews and Christians have struggled to describe his book. Pessimistic? Realistic? Hopeless? Hopeful in its apparent hopelessness?

Qoheleth, teacher and advisor to kings, has studied many things and has arrived at a tentative conclusion, “All things are vanity.” Summarizing his experience and stories he has heard from parts near and far he concludes,

All speech is labored;
there is nothing one can say.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing
nor is the ear satisfied with hearing.

Qoheleth has taken perplexity to an ultimate, existential level. He is being-who-looks-at-being and cannot see its purpose. His mirror does not reflect transparency; he sees nothing there. The eye cannot see itself. 

The world has been perplexed lately by the Covid-19 epidemic. We understand it’s a virus; it resembles other coronaviruses. But who gets the disease and why? Why do some healthy people die of it while some, apparently vulnerable, survive? Why are some people untouched? Jesus warned us of these inexplicable catastrophes,

Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left.

Catastrophes like this -- war, riots, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, epidemics, and so forth -- don’t make sense. Qoheleth could only conclude: “…yet when I applied my mind to know wisdom and knowledge, madness and folly, I learned that this also is a chase after wind.”

 

Confronted with the existential threat that anyone can die at any time, we hear Jesus's urgent command, “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”