Where Is The Bloody City?

Friday of the 18th Week in Course 2024 Where is the Bloody City?

Assyria was the bloody city in the time of the prophet Nahum. Everybody knew it. They had conquered countries from central Africa up and down, east and west, all the way up to the area we call Ukraine. And they did it brutally. That’s how the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed, their people deported as slaves all over the empire. So no one outside their capital wept when they were wiped from the face of the earth.

Yet Nahum’s words, “Woe to the bloody city,” were not the exclusive preserve of Assur, their central town. Not in the least. After them the prophets condemned Babylon, the empire that destroyed Jerusalem and enslaved its population. Then there was Persia, that gave hegemony over to Alexander and the Greeks. After them came Rome, and Byzantium, and so on until Spain and France and Britain and Germany. Then in our day the United States and the Soviet Union. Even the United States? Yes, we and Russia and Tehran and others have become the bloody city. Injustice, theft, murder of the helpless are yet the imprint of empires in our day as in that of Nahum and the other prophets. We cannot claim the moral high ground in any sense when the key plank in one major party’s platform is legalizing and underwriting the murder of infants before and during birth, and the other’s goes squishy on the life issues. To borrow from John Donne, “send not to know” where is the bloody city. We are the bloody city.

Yes, the prophets of today are still thrown into prison, although in the West, they have not yet faced the death penalty imposed on the Hebrews like Isaiah and Jesus. But the death penalty suffered by Our Lord Jesus Christ is, we know, not like the others. It was prefigured by the death of the Passover lambs in the Spring, each year thousands and thousands offered in memorial of the Hebrew escape from Egyptian slavery. The bloody sacrifice of Jesus–He gave up the last drop of His Precious Blood–gave all humans access to the graces of escape from sin slavery and of worthiness for eternal life in His Resurrected Body.

So where does that leave us, here still physically in the “bloody city” that has not recognized the Blood that redeems and transfigures us? As Jesus came down the mountain from His transfiguration and encounters with Moses and Elijah, confirmed by the voice of God as His Beloved, His Son, Peter, James and John listened to His words. He first told them not to reveal His glorious change until after His Resurrection. That confused them? He’s a vigorous man in His thirties. Why talk about death?

Jesus not only confirmed that on this journey to Jerusalem for the Jewish Passover, He would be going to His trial and execution, but He told to all His disciples that anyone who would come after Him would have his own travail. He commanded each to “deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Crucifixion was the worst form of torture and homicide. Sometimes it took the convicted several days to die, in agony the whole time. This is why the Church since time immemorial has given special honor to those who have died for the Faith. And this week we are reminded that all categories of Christians have done so.

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 remember Maximilian Kolbe, who died in the place of another Auschwitz prisoner by lethal injection in 1941.

We may not be called on during this earthly life to die in witness to our Faith, but all of us are called–it’s really a demand–by Jesus Christ to live in witness to our Faith, and our duty to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves.