Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
When one reads the books of the prophets, we learn that many of them came to a sad end at the hands of their own people: the ancestors of the same people who will demand the death of Jesus. Yet these self-righteous descendants will build memorials to those prophets, whose words are now considered scripture, as a show of their own piety, even though they would have joined in the killing of those prophets were they standing alongside their ancestors. Truly, they would repeat the actions of their ancestors soon enough, in such a way that they will have the blood of every single prophet “from Abel to Zechariah” on their hands. How is this so?
Because they will be responsible for the death of the Messiah every single prophet pointed to but never saw, save for St. John the Baptist, the last prophet.
The scribes, too, instead of being generous teachers and sharers of the Word they are so privileged to study, to write down, of which they are revered caretakers, they keep that Word under lock-and-key. They are loathe to share it, to educate others about it, because they enjoy a certain status by being such experts and caretakers. Should the hoi polloi become likewise knowledgeable about the Scriptures, what would become of the scribe?
We can fall into the same traps, looking back on our parents, on past members of our own society, people in history, people we have known, and think that we are better than they, or would never do what they did. How many of us, for example, look on World War II Germans and think, “How could they allow such terrible things? I would never.” Or we look on Civil War America, upon those who held slaves, those who massacred Native Americans; we set ourselves high above them. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, if we consider the conditions and such that fostered such views and actions, we might be humbled to realize we are not so different, for we have inherited the same inclination to sin as all of them. We are no more righteous than our ancestors simply because we are modern and “enlightened”; we are only more righteous if indeed we are actually righteous people, and this is only possible if we are following Christ more closely and faithfully than those who have gone before us.
Otherwise, as the wise old adage teaches, those who do not learn from their history—like the Pharisees—are doomed to repeat it, and the repeated error is often the worse of the two.