Today’s scriptures remind us that we often cannot see everything that God is doing.

Hearing Maccabees today reminds us that much of what seems powerful and immutable in our own time will one day pass away. As believers in a God who has “cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52), we know the kingdom of Christ is the only one that will truly last.

Jesus’ vision of the Church is not a community that trembles in fear behind its own walls but one that ventures out courageously to break down the walls that hold others captive.

Few things seem as alien to us today as the economic life of the early Church . . . The wealth of the community was pooled and distributed according to need.