This is Cardinal Francis George. I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to

reflect with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on fire. Word on

fire Catholic Ministries is a nonprofit ministry at the forefront of Catholic evangelization

using new media to spread the faith and every continent. Father Barron challenges us to

open our hearts to the Word on fire, which is God's Word of love for each of us. If our

hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us so that we might speak with love about the

one who is love. The global benefactors of Word on fire with the support of the art

stylizes of Chicago now present Word on fire. Peace be with you. Friends, our Reads for this

weekend have a special resonance, I think, for our time. But they have to do with the resurrection

of the body. And we're in the grip of a secularist ideology that denies the transcendent

order altogether and certainly life after death. If you're a strict secularist, you'd

hold that all that exists is matter and motion and that at our death our minds and memories

just even us and our bodies return to the dust from which they came. Standard sort of secularist

reading of what death is about. Now, it might surprise you a bit to know that for much

of ancient Israelite history, though they didn't deny the transcendent, they believed in God,

but belief in an individual afterlife was not widely held. Remember when the Psalmist

praise or observes, Lord can dust give you praise? Well, what he means is, you know,

once people have died, they can't praise him anymore. He's assuming this lack of belief

in afterlife. That's why our second reading, or rather our reading for today from second

macabees, is so interesting because it's one of the strongest and relatively rare Old Testament

passages that clearly asserts the truth of life after death. The setting for the story,

you know, is fascinating. Around the middle of the second century BC, so around the year,

...