What Does It Mean For Us To Read "where The Body Is, There Also The Vultures Will Gather"?

Friday of the Thirty-second Week Integral

Our Introit antiphon today is a prayer that both our Hebrew forefathers and we would recognize as one we are at least tempted to use daily: Let my prayer come into your presence; incline your ear to my cry for help, O Lord. It is from psalm 88, one of the least optimistic in the OT. It’s the one that ends “you have caused lover and friend to shun me; my only companions are in darkness.” But it is a prayer very suitable for the True God who revealed Himself in both Testaments, who loves His people and reliably does good for us.

The author of the Book of Wisdom, one that came out of the Greek Jewish community of the Diaspora, tells us “all men were by nature foolish who were in ignorance of God . . .and from studying the works did not discern the artisan.” Those of us raised with a good background in Western culture think of pagan myths from Rome and Greece as being sophisticated. That’s because the so-called “gods” of Rome and Greece were the heroes or villains of stories that caught our attention back in grade school or middle school. But there is a good reason why the word “pagan” comes from the Latin paganus. Look that word up in a good Latin dictionary and find that it’s an adjective meaning rustic and ignorant. As a noun it’s used in such a way as to mean “yokel” or “hick.” The country folk didn’t have the education of middle- and upper-class men of the city, so to make sense of the seasons and floods and hurricanes and drought, they invented gods. Those so-called “gods” were almost always hostile to humans, so the pagans offered them sacrifices to keep them content and as bribes to make them leave the country folks alone.

Our OT writer appeals to other Jews to become apologists for their faith. He wrote about the pagans: “if out of joy in their beauty they thought them gods, let them know how far more excellent is Adonai than these, for the original source of beauty fashioned them. Or if they were struck by their might and energy, let them from these things realized how much more powerful is he who made them.” St. Paul would pick up this theme in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, when he wrote: “what may be known about God is plain to [the pagans], because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

In other words, worshipers of false gods, to the Hebrew mind, were idiots. They could not think beyond the superficial reality of creatures. Our psalmist uses beloved poetry to give praise to the true God for the marvels of creation; “the heavens declare the glory of God.” The words have such a beauty, even in English, that numerous composers of sacred music have used this psalm as the libretto for their choral compositions.

Our Gospel today, like most of the Gospels in this last two weeks of our liturgical year, looks forward to the end. I use the word “end” in two ways. For each of us, as individuals and as families, our end is the purpose of our life. For all humans, made in the image and likeness of our self-emptying God, our end is God Himself, being in union as adopted children with the Blessed Trinity. But the other meaning of “end” is the end of some civilization, and our Scripture, though blunt, does not tell us which one of two denouements Jesus meant. It is ambiguous. In the short term, Jesus looks to the destruction of the corrupt Temple culture and injustice of Jerusalem. About thirty years after the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, the Zealots and other revolutionary Jews tried to overthrow the Roman rule of Judea and Galilee. This was the first Jewish war. In 70 AD, imperator Titus, who succeeded his father Vespasian as Roman commander, led four Roman legions, surrounded Jerusalem, which was filled with Passover pilgrims, and ultimately breached the walls and destroyed the city and Temple. Those Jews he did not kill he took and sold into slavery.

If we understand this history, the rather difficult text of Luke we just heard is easier to parse. Every Roman legion was symbolized by its standard, which was topped by an eagle. The Gk word for “eagle” is ?et?? aetos, but that’s also the word for “vulture.” The Gospel pronouncement of Jesus, “Where the body is, there also the vultures will gather,” can be taken two ways, and both make sense. If the word is “vulture,” then the corrupt body of Jewish culture, Jerusalem, will attract the vultures, the slave merchants, when it is besieged. Or if the word is “eagle,” then it refers to the legionary standards of the four surrounding Roman divisions.