In today’s First Reading the Kingdom of Judah, the southern part of Palestine, is facing a threat from the Kingdom of Israel, the northern part of Palestine, which has allied with Aram (Syria) to invade Judah. The Lord sends Isaiah to the king of Judah, Ahaz, to ensure him that the kings who\u00a0seek to invade are “stumps of smoldering brands”: they’re like matches that are about to burn out, flash with little substance. However, the Lord does ask for Ahaz’s faith or else his kingdom would not stand. In the end, Aram would conquer the Kingdom of Israel and Judah would not fall in Ahaz’s time, despite his weak faith.<\/p>\n
The Gospel reminds us today\u00a0what the Lord insisted on through Isaiah: “Unless your faith is firm\u00a0you shall not be firm.”\u00a0Our Lord chastises those towns who had received the grace of him and his miracles for their lack of faith: the fate they’d incur was worse that some of the worst cities in the Old Testament. Why so harsh? Because now ignorance was not an excuse.\u00a0The towns Our Lord scolds had received\u00a0a visit from God himself; they’d received the Gospel and had not believed. Due to their disbelief them would not be firm and that’s a recipe for disaster.<\/p>\n
This pattern continues even today. Society in many sectors, culture in many areas, is not what it should be. Let’s ask Our Lord to bolster our faith and through a life of faith help keep society solid. The faith is not just good for believers; it helps everyone.<\/p>\n
Readings: Isaiah 7:1\u20139;\u00a0Psalm 48:2\u20138;\u00a0Matthew 11:20\u201324.<\/em>\u00a0See also 15th Week in Ordinary Time, Tuesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In today’s First Reading the Kingdom of Judah, the southern part of Palestine, is facing a threat from the Kingdom of Israel, the northern part of Palestine, which has allied with Aram (Syria) to invade Judah. The Lord sends Isaiah to the king of Judah, Ahaz, to ensure him that the kings who\u00a0seek to invade … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[61,45,13,103],"class_list":["post-1487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fifteenth-week","tag-ordinary-time","tag-tuesday","tag-year"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p65qtw-nZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1488,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions\/1488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fathernikola.org\/liturgy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}