Monday, XXXIV Week of Ordinary Time
(Daniel 1:1-6.8-20, Luke 21:1-4)
A friend, who has a doctorate in biology, enjoys telling me about the diet of Chinese peasants. He says that since they are dirt poor, Chinese peasants can afford little meat and dairy products. Rather, he explains, they mainly eat vegetables and receive the protein that their bodies require from beans and other legumes. My friend is convinced that the Chinese peasant diet is not inferior but significantly superior to richer, western diets. He says that the fats that we consume from eating meat not only threaten our hearts but also are related to cancer.
The results of the vegetable only experiment related in the first reading today, then, should not surprise us. Although the chamberlain believes that Daniel and his companions would be undernourished by a vegetarian diet, actually they eat more healthily than the others. But, of course, good nutrition is not the prophet’s point in relating this story. Probably he, like the chamberlain, considers the diet wanting nutritionally. He means to tell us that when we abide by the Lord’s will, things always work out better. We do not need to worry, as Jesus says, about what we eat and drink or about what clothes we wear when seek first God’s kingdom.
Jesus reaffirms this lesson in the gospel today. He praises the poor widow for her generosity which is precisely the virtue he has extolled throughout this Gospel According to Luke. Sometimes we think that we might ignore God’s will as expressed by Jesus in order to secure more of a desired good. Some people argue, for example, that it would be all right to take the life of a patient suffering from incurable cancer so that she does not suffer. But such an action would violate the sanctity of human life, one of the highest principles of God’s law. No, we go out of our way to comfort and console those in agony, but we never take their lives.
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