Friday in the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 10, 2020

Matthew 10:16-23

Jesus said to his Apostles: “Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of men, for they will hand you over to courts and scourge you in their synagogues, and you will be led before governors and kings for my sake as a witness before them and the pagans. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say. You will be given at that moment what you are to say. For it will not be you who speak but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will hand over brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise up against parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but whoever endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to another. Amen, I say to you, you will not finish the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.”

St. Matthew adds these verses are part of the discourse in which Jesus prepares his Apostles to visit the towns he intends to enter on his way to Jerusalem, but they are almost certainly words which Jesus spoke to the Apostles after his Resurrection.  Matthew writes according to theme more than according to chronology.  He does this again in chapters 24 and 25 when he combines the Lord’s teaching about the end of the world with the end of Jerusalem.  It is certainly possible that Matthew understood Jesus to mean that the end of Jerusalem would immediately precede the end of the world, as though a sign of it, but this was not what Jesus meant.  Yet we are not dependent upon Matthew’s own interpretation in order to know what Jesus said.  The former tax collector faithfully records the words of his Master as he remembers them, and the Holy Spirit, through the Church, helps us to understand what the Lord Jesus did mean.

Jesus here describes the state of the Church in Galilee and Judea in the years after Pentecost until the time the Romans destroyed the temple.  It is a sobering account.  If the Apostles thought that the Resurrection of Jesus was going to usher in a golden age, he quickly disabused them.  The Lord in fact describes a chaotic state of relentless persecution in which children would be informing on parents, and in which “you will be hated by all because of my name.”  The Christians would be rounded up by Jewish officials as well as by secular rulers.  They would be tortured, put on trial, and killed.  In all of this, Jesus offers two promises, that “whoever endures to the end will be saved”, and that “when they persecute you in one town, flee to another. Amen, I say to you, you will not finish the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.”  Even so, “whoever endures to the end” sounds ominous.  This is not a general predicting quick victories, or the leader of a movement who is explaining how hard work now will result in the changes his followers are seeking.  Indeed, it sounds like Jesus is preparing his Apostles for failure.  As it turned out, his promise about “finishing the towns of Israel”, which probably sounded like a not too distant time, proved more a parable than a reassurance that he would come again quickly — we still have not “finished” these towns, two thousand years later.

We ought to consider with awe the courage of these first believers.  Who among us would remain with the Lord faced with these certainties?  Who would throw his life away like this?  What love these believers had for Jesus!  We also see the power of the grace which worked in St. Stephen, St. Paul, and St. Mary Magdalene, who would not be denied a Prize which only they could see, surrounded by their persecutors and those who hated the Lord.