It is perhaps fitting that today, when the Church celebrates the memorial of Saint Agnes, a third-century virgin and martyr whose name is included in the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I), we read the story of David and Goliath. In this episode, it is the youthful David’s faith in God before the frightening figure of Goliath that is so commendable: The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear, will also keep me safe from the clutches of this Philistine. And so it happens: God strikes down Goliath through David, thereby showing the strength of his arm, casting down the mighty, and lifting up the lowly (cf. Luke 1:51–52).
The victory of Agnes is somewhat different, and if anything, more incredible: whereas slays Goliath with a stone and cuts off his head, the young Agnes — perhaps twelve or thirteen years old — triumphs over her persecutors precisely through her death, living out to the very end the pattern of Jesus Christ, her Lord. Agnes, young though she is, obeys a higher law of faith and charity than the law of nature which would have her preserve her own life, even as Jesus points to the precedence of charity over the law of the sabbath in his healing of the man with the withered hand in today’s Gospel.
Today, then, let us ponder the victory of God through faith and charity, especially in the figures of David and Agnes. And asking their intercession, let us ask Christ to show his victory through us, even and especially when we are beset by challenges that seem too great for us.