HOMILY: WEDNESDAY 33RD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR A
THEME: All for love of God!
By: Rev Fr Oselumhense Anetor (Uromi Diocese)
2 Macc.7:1,20-31; Luke 19:11-28
The woman in today’s first reading is a strange woman. She stood and watched as six of her sons were beheaded for refusing to taste pig’s flesh. Phew! She even encouraged them to die rather than disobey God’s law. And then when she was given one last opportunity to appeal to her last child to eat pig’s flesh, she did the contrary; encouraging him to die like his brothers. STRANGE! What about St. Cecilia? Like the woman in the first reading, she too looked at death in the eye and faced it with courage, knowing that life after death meant much more.
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Friends, Cecilia has been honored as a patron saint of church music since the 16th century. According to Tradition, she prayed to God and sang sacred chants as she was being led to the altar forcefully on her wedding day. This wedding would later bring about the conversion of her husband Valerian and his brother Tiburtius, who also both suffered martyrdom. Cecilia too was sentenced to death by the Roman Prefect Almachius, for refusing to sacrifice to jupiter. After the attempt to suffocate her in her own bathroom failed, a soldier sent to behead her struck at her neck three times, then left her lying, still alive, for it was against the law to strike a fourth time. She lingered on for three days, during which the Christians who remained in Rome flocked to her house. In dying she bequeathed all her goods to the poor, and her house to the bishop for a Christian place of worship.
Good morning dear. God bless your day ahead. St Cecilia, pray for us.
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