Reading and Heeding God’s Writing on the Wall, 34th Wednesday (I), November 24, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 34th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Andrew Dung Lac and Companions, Martyrs
November 24, 2021
Dan 5:5:1-6.13-14.16-17.23-28, Dan 3, Lk 21:12-19

To listen to a recording of today’s homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• November is a month in which we pray for our faithful departed and focus on the last things, especially about our call to holiness and heaven. It’s also a month in which the Church forms us concretely for what is to come. In the early Church, catechumens could not be baptized until they were ready to be martyrs, because many of them would be threatened with martyrdom as soon as they were Christians. As we ponder Jesus’ words at the end of his journey to Jerusalem, we can see that he was doing the same. He was telling us what was to come so that we wouldn’t be surprised, shocked, scandalized, or paralyzed when they occurred, and so that, just like a soldier well-trained in boot camp for war, we might be prepared to know what to do when these eventualities transpire.
• In the Gospel Jesus describes what was coming for his disciples. Just like would happen to him, so they, too, would be seized and persecuted, handed over to religious and civil leaders, thrown in prison, betrayed my family members and friends, hated by all, and even martyred. But he told them why it would occur: so that they would be able to give witness. Sometimes persecution is the Christian’s greatest pulpit. Jesus told them not to worry about what to say, that the Holy Spirit would teach them what to say, and despite their martyrdom, not a single follicle would be destroyed but that all would be restored — even to the baldest of them! — in the resurrection. “By your perseverance,” he stressed, “you will secure your lives.” He was stressing — in words that are highly relevant to our age of rampant personal insecurity — that real security comes from building our whole life on God. Once we do, nothing in all of creation — not persecution, peril or the sword (Rom 8:31-39) — will be able to separate us from God. By persevering in faith, we will be secure now and secure later, even if all fleeting forms of worldly security disappear. This is a lesson we always need to learn. The first Christians suffered so much, including the plundering of their property and even their lives, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews (10:34), but they didn’t fear, because they had a greater security in God. True security in God can’t be given by the world or stolen by those in the world. That’s why the martyrs in every age weren’t afraid even during while suffering torture or death.
• There’s a great contrast between this type of security in faith in relation with God that Jesus wants us to have even in the humanly worst of circumstances and the type of insecurity we see in King Belshazzar in today’s first reading. He was living outwardly very securely. He was throwing a banquet for 1,000 courtiers and their wives at a time of great prosperity. He decided to have some of the 5,400 gold and silver chalices that King Nebuchadnezzar had taken from Jerusalem brought out, using what was sacred for the Jews for their drunken party. But when, straight out of a script of the Addams’ Family television program, a hand started writing on the wall, we see that his security was just an outward show: “When the king saw the wrist and hand that wrote,” the Prophet Daniel tells us, “his face blanched; his thoughts terrified him, his hip joints shook, and his knees knocked.” None of his pagan experts could mollify his anxiety, because no matter how smart they were, they didn’t have divine wisdom. Daniel was brought in and he was able to interpret the three words that were being written on the wall: mene, tekel, peres, which were three terms for coins. Mene was a full payment, and Daniel used it to express that Belshazzar’s kingdom was “fulfilled” or all over; a tekel was 1/60 of a mene, indicating that Belshazzar doesn’t weigh very much; and peres, which was half of mene, indicating that his kingdom would be divided in half. Belshazzar’s kingdom would come to an end that very night when his kingdom and the palace would be invaded by Darius and Belshazzar would be killed. Like the man in the parable whom Jesus called foolish for building bigger grain bins to store his harvest only to have his life taken that very night, Belshazzar was an even bigger fool, sacrilegiously debauching the things of God not realizing that he would be weighed in the balance and found less secure than a feather. Today there are still many who, even though they’re in prominent positions with body guards or have incredible houses with state-of-the-art security systems, aren’t really secure at all. There are also many who, as they approach their own mene or the fulfillment of their life, might indeed be as weighty as a tekel because their life is peres, or divided, among many things. The writing on the wall of King Belshazzar’s palace is also written for us.
• Those who were secure in God despite insecure times, who were found weighty in holiness, who were betrayed, seized, persecuted, and hated by many, but who persevered until the end faithfully are the Vietnamese martyrs we celebrate today, St. Andrew Dung-Lac and his 116 companions, just 117 of the estimated 130,000 Vietnamese Catholics who gave their lives for Christ between the 17th and 19th centuries. St. Andrew gave his supreme testimony to Christ in 1839. He was a teenage catechist who was eventually ordained and was tireless in his preaching and ministry of baptism, exhorting others to constancy and fidelity. He himself, like so many of those to whom he ministered, was captured and sentenced to death. The tortures suffered by the Vietnamese Catholics are among the worst recorded. Their limbs were hacked off joint by joint, their flesh was torn off with red hot tongs, they were drugged, caged, and exposed to many indignities. They were commonly branded on the face with the words “ta dao,” which means “sinister religion,” but none of that was able to detach them from true religion. One of the Vietnamese martyrs was St. Paul Le-Bao-Tinh who wrote a letter to the students of the Seminary of Ke-Vinh in 1843. His words have become famous because Pope Benedict XVI featured them in Spe Salvi as a description of Christian hope, the hope that comes from knowing that Christ is with us, that we are solidly built on him. It shows how suffering can indeed become the Christian’s most powerful pulpit. St. Paul wrote, “I, Paul, in chains for the name of Christ, wish to relate to you the trials besetting me daily, in order that you may be inflamed with love for God and join with me in his praises, for his mercy is for ever. The prison here is a true image of everlasting hell: to cruel tortures of every kind—shackles, iron chains, manacles—are added hatred, vengeance, calumnies, obscene speech, quarrels, evil acts, swearing, curses, as well as anguish and grief. But the God who once freed the three children from the fiery furnace is with me always; he has delivered me from these tribulations and made them sweet, for his mercy is for ever. In the midst of these torments, which usually terrify others, I am, by the grace of God, full of joy and gladness, because I am not alone—Christ is with me. Our master bears the whole weight of the cross, leaving me only the tiniest, last bit. He is not a mere onlooker in my struggle, but a contestant and the victor and champion in the whole battle. Therefore upon his head is placed the crown of victory, and his members also share in his glory. …  I write these things to you in order that your faith and mine may be united. In the midst of this storm I cast my anchor toward the throne of God, the anchor that is the lively home in my heart. … Come to my aid with your prayers, that I may have the strength to fight according to the law, and indeed to fight the good fight and to fight until the end and so finish the race. We may not again see each other in this life, but we will have the happiness of seeing each other again in the world to come, when, standing at the throne of the spotless Lamb, we will together join in singing his praises and exult for ever in the joy of our triumph. Amen.” That’s what it means to our “giving testimony.” That’s what it looks like to be given “a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.” That’s the gift God wants to give us in the midst of this insecure age.
• Today God the Father sends not a hand to start moving on the walls of this chapel, but his Son, who in the Eucharistic Prayer we’ll use, is described as the “hand You stretch out to sinners.” We will not take up sacred vessels to use for alcohol, but Jesus himself will take up a chalice and change wine into his blood. He will seek to make us, indeed, vessels used not for debauchery but to give him “glory and eternal praise.” This is the greatest means by which we will become not tekel but qadosh, weighty or holy, and have our names written by God’s hand, like those of the Vietnamese martyrs, in the eternal book of life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
DN 5:1-6, 13-14, 16-17, 23-28

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