Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Jeremiah 14:17-22; Matthew
13:36-43)
In today’s first reading Jeremiah
describes a war-strewn, devastated Jerusalem. The death and destruction will
remind contemporary readers of nuclear war classics like On the Beach and
The Road. There will be no
winners of a nuclear war. Rather, all survivors
will be left in grief, horror, and fear of their imminent ends.
The gospel hints at how to avoid nuclear war. First, evil must be recognized, not only in a
nation’s enemies, but – as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn advised – in every human heart. Then, as the gospel implies, the nations must
learn to tolerate those whose ways they find repugnant and build a strategic
defense plan in case hostility overruns civility.
St. Augustine in his monumental work, The City of God,
sketches a plan for peace among nations.
He advocates that governments recognize their duty to defend their
people; that they use force when necessary to prevent evil from taking hold; and
that their cause be just for going into battle and that their soldiers hold the
right intention for participating in it.
