Trough Mary the Father's blessing has shown forth on mankind

Treasures of Our Faith with Deacon Richard Vehige

Today, December 12, as our Church celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of Guadalupe we are invited to reflect on a passage from the first book of Chronicles (17: 1-15), entitled “A prophecy concerning David’s son”. Our treasure, which follows, is from a sermon by Saint Sophronius, bishop.

Saint Sophronius was a courageous leader of the Jerusalem Church during the Islamic conquests of the seventh century. Born in Damascus, Syria, around the year 560, Sophronius came from an esteemed family and received a deep philosophical education. His early devotion to God grew into an inclination toward monastic life, and while still young he entered a monastery in Palestine. He became a friend and student of John Moschus, his fellow monk who would become an important spiritual writer in the Eastern Christian tradition.

St. Sophronius was bishop of Jerusalem in the early 7th century and preached this sermon on the Blessed Virgin Mary on the occasion of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Lord around the year 635 AD, the year that the Holy City fell to the Muslim armies advancing from Arabia. It demonstrates the strong devotion to the Mother of God that existed in the early era of the Fathers of the Church. This reading is used in the Roman Catholic Office of Readings, in the Common of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Books of Chronicles record in some detail the lengthy span (some five hundred fifty years) from the death of King Saul to the return from the exile. Unlike today’s history writing, wherein factual accuracy and impartiality of judgment are the norm, biblical history, with rare exceptions, was less concerned with reporting in precise detail all the facts of a situation than with drawing out the meaning of those facts. Biblical history was thus primarily interpretative, and its purpose was to disclose the action of the living God in human affairs. For this reason we speak of it as “sacred history.”

These characteristics are apparent when we examine the primary objective of the Chronicler (the conventional designation for the anonymous author) in compiling his work. Given the situation which confronted the Jewish people at this time (the end of the fifth century B.C.), the Chronicler realized that Israel’s political greatness was a thing of the past. Yet, for the Chronicler, Israel’s past held the key to the people’s future. In particular, the Chronicler aimed to establish and defend the legitimate claims of the Davidic monarchy in Israel’s history, and to underscore the status of Jerusalem and its divinely established Temple worship as the center of religious life for the Jewish people. If Judaism was to survive and prosper, it would have to heed the lessons of the past and devoutly serve its God in the place where he had chosen to dwell, the Temple in Jerusalem. From the Chronicler’s point of view, the reigns of David and Solomon were the ideal to which all subsequent rule in Judah must aspire. The Chronicler was much more interested in David’s religious and cultic influence than in his political power, however. He saw David’s (and Solomon’s) primary importance as deriving rather from their roles in the establishment of Jerusalem and its Temple as the center of the true worship of the Lord. Furthermore, he presents David as the one who prescribed the Temple’s elaborate ritual (which, in point of fact, only gradually evolved in the Second Temple period) and who appointed the Levites to supervise the liturgical services there.