KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 April
Despising the suffering that brings death
Maccabees . Not certainly well known and yet The Books of Maccabees are profound and important works that belong to the intertestamental period; in other words, works that were written between the setting down of the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures. The Books of Maccabees are among a collection of writings that are sometimes called Deutero-canonical texts by Roman Catholics and Apocryphal texts by Protestants. They have different kinds of standing within the Protestant Churches and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. For Anglicans they are read, if at all, not“to establish any doctrine” but “for example of life and instruction of manners.”
First and Second Maccabees deal with persecution, with the collision of cultures during the Hellenistic period. Maccabees itself means ‘hammer’ and refers to a family of heroes who stood up against Greek dominance. But more than simply belonging to the conflict narratives that bedevil so much of our own discourse, they open us out to important questions of a moral and an intellectual nature that, to some extent, transcend the divisions and oppositions that are the assumption and conclusion of all conflict narratives. As such, perhaps, they speak to some of our confusions and uncertainties about character and about what it means to be human, what it means to be a self.
In Chapel this week we read from 2nd Maccabees and from 4th Maccabees, the latter most likely completely unknown to most students and faculty and not found in most Bibles. The story in 2nd Maccabees was the powerful story of “the admirable mother” of the seven sons of Eleazar, all martyred because they stood up to the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. The story reflects the conditions of Israel under Hellenism following the conquests of Alexander the Great. In a way, the story speaks to the question, the important question for all of us, about how we face adversity.