God's Interconnected Generational Plan

Welcome to Slaking Thirst, a podcast that's all about bringing the thirst deep within our hearts for love and communion to the heart of Christ, a divine heart, who is seeking our love and communion in return. The hope is that the two thirsts would meet, and both thirsts would be slaked. Friends, good morning. So...

The scriptures that we have this morning, both from Daniel and this gospel that we have from Luke, they all are, they're both talking about prophecy. They're all talking about prophecy. We modern people, we don't tend to put a lot of stock in prophecy. We kind of...

Kind of poo-poo at a superstitious nonsense. I think about, I remember coming home from school in like third, fourth grade and watching TV. Remember Miss Cleo? That woman who'd be on TV and people would call in asking her to like... read their future and yeah so that's not exactly what the bible means by prophecy right okay so when we when we speak about prophecy uh biblically speaking or theologically speaking we tend to think of prophecy

simply in terms of one who's called to speak on behalf of God. So insofar as we're all baptized, right, we're all priest, prophet, and king. So we're all called into this prophetic mission, speaking on God's behalf. And yet, there's also this sense of foretelling what is to come, which makes us kind of uncomfortable.

Like it's quite a bit more palatable to just simply speak about prophecy as you're called to speak on God's behalf. But all throughout the scriptures, there's this other sense of prophecy being one that... one who is foretelling what is to come. It becomes abundantly clear that in the scriptures, this was one of the primary ways in which God verified his activity in the life of his people.

He raised up prophets to say this is going to happen and then it happened. So you got two instances of prophetic utterances in the scriptures today. You got Jesus in the gospel prophesying the devastation of Jerusalem, the total destruction of the temple, right?

Come a day when there's not a stone left upon another stone on the temple, it will be all torn down. I preached about this just, I don't know if it was a weekend or two ago. But that came to pass in 63 AD, the Romans, under the general... Trajan, they come, no, Titus, they come into Rome and they sack Jerusalem. They sack Jerusalem and they raise the temple to the ground. That did come about.

I want to direct our attention, though, I think it's more fascinating, to the prophecies we have from Daniel, from this first reading, which aren't really as familiar to us as Christians, but they're incredibly, incredibly important for the Jews of Jesus' day. These prophetic... Why? Why do the Jews of Jesus' day care so much about these prophecies? It's because Daniel's oracles, they established a timeline.

Like an hourglass, if you will, for the messianic expectation. That's why they were so significant. So I came across the work of Dr. Brant Petrie. This was years ago, and he's the one who introduced me to all of this. He's an American scripture scholar. Like, I had often wondered why. Why was it the case when you read the Gospels? Like, why is there such political and religious fur?

at the time of christ like there was so much turmoil and political religious turbulence that surrounded his birth why why was there this intense messianic expectation. It was just in the air at that time. Why was Herod the Great so panicked and paranoid that he was driven to just murder any threat to his rule?

He killed all of his sons. He had all of his wives except for one or two strangled because he thought they were undermining his authority and bringing in the Messiah. Or why were the Magi? What were the Magi doing? reading the prophecies, looking at the stars, waiting for a newborn king to show up in Israel. By the way, why were the Magi even exposed to the prophecies of Daniel in the first place? It wasn't because they were...

I don't know, really well-read people. It's because Daniel, in this first reading we have, Daniel is writing from captivity. He's in the east. These prophecies were being uttered when he was in captivity in Babylon, so those oracles began to circulate. That's what they were reading.

Okay, so what does Daniel see in this interpretation of the king's dream? He sees this. He sees there would be a series of kingdoms and rulers who would succeed one another. So first you have the Babylonians under the king Nebuchadnezzar.

Then they are succeeded by the Persians. They conquer the Babylonians. And the Persians are succeeded and conquered by the Greeks. And the Greeks are succeeded and conquered by the Romans. And it's within the rule of the Romans, God would, as Daniel says, In the lifetime of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed or delivered up to another people like an everlasting kingdom.

Rather, it shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and put an end to them, and it shall stand forever. He says to the king, that is the meaning of the stone you saw hewn from the mountain without a hand being put to it. which broke in pieces the tile, the iron, the bronze, the silver, the gold. What do we hear about Christ? That Christ is the stone rejected by the builders.

The stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone. Or think of Christ as like the single stone put in David's sling that he whips around and wields and he strikes Goliath in the head, bringing down the giant. Right? Or this is a fascinating piece of archaeological history that where Christ was crucified, Golgotha, you go there today, it's within the built over, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built over Golgotha.

Why did the Romans carry out crucifixions there? Because first, it was outside of the city limits. It was on a main thoroughfare as you would come into the ancient city of Jerusalem. There was a quarry outside of the city. And the quarry, the masons, they were quarrying the rock, and they eventually got to a piece of rock that was ironized rock. It was no good for building. You couldn't use this rock for construction. And so this stone that was rejected became the site of Roman crucifixion.

The very spot where Christ was crucified was the stone rejected by the builders. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating. I think it's astounding when you begin to see the interconnected plan that the Lord laid out over the course of... So many centuries, a plan that was foretold and seen by Daniel centuries before the birth of Christ. Entering into Advent next week, this... Entering into the messianic longing and expectation of the people of Israel. But all of that, all of that is fulfilled here.

One of the things that Christians, the Catholics, kind of get wrong about Advent, we treat Advent like we're suspending our... Knowledge that Christ has already come. It's like as if we go through Advent going, I can't wait for Jesus to get here. I can't wait for him to be born. No, it already happened. That's done, right? We are entering into the... first longing of the people waiting for him to come, feeling that to get us to ache for his second coming, the fulfillment of all this.

Anyway, that's a lot for 8 o'clock in the morning. I think Daniel's fascinating. And I think these prophecies are really, really cool. And the fact that we are just swimming in this, in the Mass, is so beautiful to me. To listen to more homilies, talks, and reflections from Fr. Ryan and Fr. Patrick, please check out slakingthirst.com and consider becoming a subscriber to the Slaking Thirst YouTube channel.