Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends, the

story conveyed in our first reading for this weekend is from the second book of

Maccabees and a story that just resonates up and down the ages and one that

stirs our hearts today. It sounds in some ways like it's taken right out of

the headlines of today. The historical setting for this text is I'd say

depressingly familiar to us. So ancient Israel have been overrun by the Greek

culture to kind of oversimplify a king called Antiochus IV epiphanies. He was

descended from one of the generals of Alexander the Great and he had come to

dominate Jewish land. So the bottom line is that it's a political force of a

kind of a Greek cultural background which has now come to dominate the land of

Israel. And so what the king tries to do is to impose Greek culture and Greek

religion on the Jews. Now you see what I mean when I say this is kind of

depressingly familiar. The story of kind of cultural aggression, religious

imposition, etc. It led him to desecrate the temple in Jerusalem. So if you're

a biblical Jew, there was no place on earth more sacred than the Jerusalem

temple. And so for Gentiles, for foreigners to come in to put their own symbols

...