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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
Today’s readings are from Tuesday of the 34th week in Ordinary Time. In the first reading, the prophet Daniel tells King Nebuchadnezzar the meaning of his dream. Jesus tells his followers to trust in Him and not in the false predictions of others.
What Jesus can do
These readings build on what we heard yesterday from the book of the prophet Daniel. We missed a little bit of a part here because Nebuchadnezzar is deeply troubled by the fact that he has had this dream and none of the people from his own kingdom can tell him what it means. But Daniel can. And really it’s a prediction that describes pretty accurately what will become of the world around Daniel. And in particular what will happen after Nebuchadnezzar.
Remember, Nebuchadnezzar was a very powerful but not a very nice king. There was lots of persecution in his time and he was fickle. There were some things that weren’t always lasting in what he wanted. Sometimes he’d get upset about something and then not so much at all.
The gospel also speaks about kind of this end of time prediction where in practical terms the temple is in fact destroyed. But in more realistic ways it’s a signal that nothing here lasts forever. We see this type of understanding that there’s a certain temporary nature to the things of this earth in other religions too but probably most notably in Buddhism where they make these beautiful artworks for example these mandalas which are made typically of sand and they’re beautiful.
But then they’re completely destroyed almost immediately after they’re made because nothing is permanent. And the end of the year in the church kind of reminds us of what truly is permanent. It’s really to get our attention so that we can see what we should really hold our hope in, what we should really cling to, what we should really make the priority of our life and that is our relationship with God.
Many in this gospel will be fooled. People will come. We see it all the time. Every now and then there’s great excitement because somebody predicts that such and such a time is going to be the end of the world. The prediction comes, the prediction goes and we’re still here.
But there are also people who come really with the point simply of terrifying and not of leading. Think about really the state of our world. It would be easy and understandable to get quite discouraged about the way things are.
Everywhere we look it seems that Jesus’ predictions are absolutely true. Nations rising against nations, wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, suffering is all around us. It seems that really the world is so broken that if we think of it only reasonably we’d say it just simply can’t be fixed. Things are just too far gone. We just have to kind of pay attention to our own lives and do whatever.
But what Jesus is encouraging us to do, particularly in these kind of end time gospels, is to get us to think about what it is that he can do for us. How it is that he can heal brokenness. What it is that he can do to enable us to witness to the power of God’s love in people’s lives. We may not be able to heal every brokenness in the world, but Jesus can.
We are called to be those witnesses who don’t give in to fear, but in fact ask Jesus to increase our faith. Let us ask the Lord today to help us to come to see how it is that he longs to give us eternal life, that he longs to fulfill our hearts, that he longs to give us peace. He longs to give us an eternal relationship with him that has no end.
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