Friday of the Fourth Week Integral Feb 6 2026 Paul Miki and Companions
Today we began our prayer with a line about the saints: “for love of [Christ] they shed their blood; they now exult with Christ forever.” The saints we commemorate today are the Japanese Jesuit Paul Miki and twenty-five others, priests, consecrated religious and lay people. They were all lovers of Jesus Christ, baptized Catholic Christians, crucified for their faith in Christ on February 5, 1597, on a hill outside Nagasaki, Japan. You can find Paul’s last sermon, preached from his cross, on the Internet.
Our first reading today is from the book of Sirach, a tribute to the greatest king of Israel, David. It is part of a long section of Sirach that begins “Let us now praise famous men.” They are “men of mercy,” so they are known for their goodness and dedication to God’s way, even though, like all of us, they are sinners. We see hymns about Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Caleb, Phineas, Joshua, Samuel and David. It is noteworthy that Solomon is praised for his youthful wisdom, but ill-remembered for his latter-day infidelity. Yeshua Ben Sira lived in a time when Israel was tributary to the Greeks who ruled after Alexander, but he is careful to give testimony to the covenant between God and David’s descendants. He writes “the Lord will never give up his mercy, nor cause any of his works to perish; he will never blot out the descendants of his chosen one, nor destroy the posterity of him who loved him.” That, we know, was King David himself. Ben Sira, writing not too many decades before Christ, shows us that even when the Jews were dominated by Gentile kings, they still looked forward to a descendant of David whose rule would be everlasting. That, we know, was and is our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our psalm is written and sung with the same faith in the promise of God. David the psalmist praises the God who gave him deliverance from Saul, showing him and his descendants kindness forever.
St. Mark tells us a story about the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who had been told about Jesus and His disciples expanding upon the ministry of John the Baptist. He stupidly thought in his superstitious mind that Jesus was John, risen from the dead. Mark uses this fact to tell us about John the Baptist being thrown into prison by slack-spined Herod because his wife, Herodias, stayed angry at John. The prophet had made an enemy in that bloodthirsty queen by constantly accusing Herod and Herodias of grave sin, since Herod had stolen Herodias from her first husband, Herod’s brother. Herodias plotted with her daughter to give the old tyrant a birthday party, with the young girl as the chief entertainment. The drunken fool loved the dance and promised her anything up to half his kingdom as a reward. She knew what her mother wanted, so John the Baptist paid the price, and became a martyr of the faith. He was the last prophet of the OT and the first of the New.
Like Paul Miki and his friends, there have always been martyrs of the faith and always will be. Let us pray for all those who suffer under persecution, promised by Christ in His Sermon on the Mount. Let us pray for their perseverance, and for ourselves as well, enduring the little daily martyrdoms that bring us graces. And let us pray also today for the spread of the faith of Christ in Japan and all the regions of Asia.
