Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
Standing up for God
Those who gave Saint Paul a challenge and beat him thought they were preserving their right in Rome to worship as Jews.
This first reading needs a little bit of context in order for us to understand it, I think.
So, the Jewish people had worked out kind of a deal with the Romans so that they could worship their god while everyone else in the Roman Empire worshipped the emperor who was a god. So, there were many among the Jewish people that worked very hard and very zealously to guard this agreement.
The fear that is being portrayed here is that if it is seen that the Jewish people are not living up to their bargain, but in fact accepting Jesus as the Messiah, that this could unravel the whole freedom that the Jewish people enjoyed to worship the one god. And so, that's part of the context behind this and it would seem that that is also the reason why this case is being tried in Roman courts.
The Roman judge does not in any way want to get in the middle of this. He is not going to make decisions on matters of Jewish religion, which is how he sees it. Simply a conflict among the Jewish people, nothing more.
Not unlike, quite frankly, when it comes to questions of religion. The Catholic Church and in fact all religions enjoy what is known as the ministerial exemption, which means that in hiring and firing and so forth, rules of religion can be applied that would not be allowed in any other employment context.
The court does not want to get in the middle of what is the definition of a minister and it has repeatedly avoided making such decisions. So, this is not a thing that we also don't do in our own instance today. So much so, does the Roman official want to be removed from this situation that even the beating of a synagogue official, this poor Sosthenes, is not enough to get his attention. He simply won't deal with it.
In our own lives sometimes we can be like that too. There can be matters of faith that we simply don't want to deal with. There can be things that we simply don't want to challenge.
I would say for Catholics, one area is that we don't generally speaking like to talk about our faith if we don't know what other people believe. We tend to want to leave it alone. But Jesus tells us that sharing with the world the good news that God has saved us from our sins is worth talking about. It's worth sharing.
Let us ask the Lord to help us to share the good news of our own faith with those who need it so that we might be good disciples of the Lord Jesus, following him wherever he leads, and sharing with people all that he has done for us.
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