Renewing the Covenant

Homily for Saturday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time

Yesterday Joshua recounted the history of the children of Israel from Terah, the father of Abram, until the present day. This may not strike us as significant because most of us have heard that history over and over again. Then we realize that the people to whom Joshua is speaking were all born after the exodus from Egypt. They had wandered in the desert for forty years, the length of two generations. Most if not all of them did not experience the slavery of Egypt.

Today Joshua turns from history and reveals the reason for his discourse. He is asking them to renew the covenant relationship that Israel formed with God at Mt. Sinai and to foreswear the idolatry of their ancestors. We usually think of these people as all belonging to the same race. However, the group that left Egypt was a multicultural and multiethnic group. They had formed themselves into a united people through the covenant that Moses had forged for them on Mt. Sinai. Now Joshua was asking them to go all in, to make no room for strange gods. The people promised Joshua that they would obey God and God’s voice.

Today the Church remembers St. Maximilian Kolbe who made the ultimate choice to love God and serve.  A Polish Franciscan priest, his monastery in German-occupied Poland published several anti-Nazi German publications. The monastery also helped to hide, feed and clothe 3,000 Polish refugees, about half of them, Jews. Kolbe was arrested in February 1941 and a few months later was a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp. That August three prisoners escaped. In retribution, the Nazis chose ten other random prisoners from the same cell block for the underground starvation bunker. As the names were called out, one of the unlucky ones, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, “My wife! My children!” Witnesses watched in astonishment as Fr. Kolbe offered to take the man’s place. Kolbe pointed to Gajowniczek, a man he did not know, and said “I am a Catholic priest; I would like to take his place because he has a wife and children.” His offer was accepted, and he and nine other prisoners were sent to the bunker.  Gajowniczek, who was present at Kolbe’s canonization in 1971, remembered, “I could only thank him with my eyes.”

St. Maximilian stands today as an example of someone who was “all in” when it came to his faith. We praise and thank God for his witness and the testimony of his life in today’s Eucharist.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator