Dom Bettinelli at Betnet.com has a new tumblelog appropriately named Bettumblog. This is a place he started for interesting clippings he finds, but provided without comment. There he had posted some lectionary statistics about the percent of the bible you will hear at mass.
For the New Testament, if you go just on Sundays, you get about 41%, and if you go daily, you get about 72%. For the Old Testament it is about 4% from Sunday masses and 14% if you attend daily mass. So, if you rely only on mass attendance for your Bible reading you are missing out on A LOT, especially from the OT.
Read your bible! You will find that it has great relevance for and many parallels with today!
Last night, I was reading 1st Maccabees (0% in Sunday lectionary readings). It was describing how the Seleucid king had conquered Israel, had taken over the temple, and had banned Jewish worship and rituals (those circumcising their sons were killed - the mother, those doing the circumcision, and the child). This was done because the king, Antiochus, wanted to unify his realm with a single religion (worshiping the Greek gods).
So here is the part that is relevant for today. Many of the Jews who had admired Greek culture embraced this change and became apostates - rejecting their faith in the true God - even some of the priests!
While we do not have a pantheon of false gods in the sense of Zeus and his ilk, we do have a modern pantheon of materialism, sex, power, science, nature, and the self. While none of these “gods” are wrong when kept in their proper place, our modern society tells us to fall down and worship them. They take the good that these false gods are based upon, and distort them until they are evil. We are pressured to abandon our God and follow their “truth.”
Secular cultural leaders tell people of faith that they are fools, and that true knowledge and wisdom are found in their false gods. The worst of these are those that masquerade as religious or faithful. Those who have bought into the modern fallacies - those who reject the tenets of the faith, but retain the “cultural” aspect of their religion. Or they tell us the god “tolerance” supersedes all else, and any disagreement is simply not tolerated.
Here is the good news/bad news. In Maccabees, even though the false religion succeeds for a while - a statue of a false god is even erected in the temple, the resistance of those who remain faithful renews the Jewish faith and restores Jerusalem. Here is the bad news, it was not easy and many suffered.
This theme recurs frequently in the Bible. Our faith will be challenged, many will fall, but those who stay faithful will be saved in the end - but not without suffering. It is always good to remind ourselves that the faithful win in the end, but it is also important to remember that we may suffer greatly before that time. Stay faithful.
