Did Any Other God Ever Do Such A Thing?

Friday of the Eighteenth Week in Course 2025

I call this the week of martyrs. Jakob Gapp, a Marianist Austrian priest, had boldly preached love for all races and rejection of Nazism since 1938. He was beheaded this week in 1943 by the Gestapo. Today we celebrate Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, of Jewish parentage, a convert murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942. On the seventh we commemorated St. Sixtus II, martyred with four deacon companions in the year 258 at the order of Emperor Valerian. Four days later the deacon Lawrence was barbecued to death. Now he’s the patron of Rome. And on the fourteenth we will remember Maximilian Kolbe, who died in the place of another Auschwitz prisoner by lethal injection in 1941.

Why did all these men and women give up their lives instead of pledging fealty to the insane political rulers of the day, whether they be Roman emperors or a Nazi dictator? They were in fact inscribing their names in blood on a covenant that goes back to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah, reached a kind of climax with the liberator Moses, took political and liturgical shape in the rule of King David, and was consummated in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man. It has shape today in the Church Christ founded, and because it swears allegiance to Jesus, it will always be resented and frequently persecuted by earthly rulers. That’s a four-thousand-year-old history, or more. Moses asked the rhetorical question, to which the answer is a resounding “no.” His question echoes off the historical walls, both east and west: “Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?”

No, never before. God ripped off the Egyptian tyrants and stole a whole nation of slaves, leading them out and into a land of liberty flowing with milk and honey. But that was not enough. As the Hebrew prayer Dayenu goes, God also gave them the Law, the commandments, a fertile land, a Davidic dynasty, a prophetic history that led to John the Baptist, who deferred to his cousin, Jeshua ben Joseph, as the true Messiah and Lamb who takes away all sins we repent of.

So, as the psalmist says, we remember the deeds of the Lord, and meditate on all these works, celebrating the God who works wonders and shows His power. As we gather together, we break the bread of His presence and share the cup of His redemption. We ask for the grace to pledge and give our lives to the service of Christ and His people. We don’t need fame or power or wealth or glory. Lord, we need only Thyself, and offer ourselves for Thy service, as we praise and magnify the Father, Son and Holy Ghost now and forever, Amen.