Scripture Daily

Context No. 2003 of 4322 · 2 Maccabees

Context · Reflection

2 Maccabees 7:24-29: in context

24But Antiochus, thinking himself to be despised, and suspecting the reproachful voice, while the youngest was yet alive didn’t only make his appeal to him by words, but also at the same time promised with oaths that he would enrich him and raise him to high honor if he would turn from the ways of his ancestors, and that he would take him for his friend and entrust him with public affairs. 25But when the young man would in no way listen, the king called to him his mother, and urged her to advise the youth to save himself. 26When he had urged her with many words, she undertook to persuade her son. 27But bending toward him, laughing the cruel tyrant to scorn, she spoke this in the language of her fathers: “My son, have pity upon me who carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you three years, and nourished and brought you up to this age, and sustained you. 28I beg you, my child, to lift your eyes to the sky and the earth, and to see all things that are in it, and thus to recognize that God made them not of things that were, and that the race of men in this way comes into being. 29Don’t be afraid of this butcher, but, proving yourself worthy of your brothers, accept your death, that in God’s mercy I may receive you again with your brothers.”

As Antiochus tortures a Jewish family for refusing to abandon God's law, only the youngest son remains. The king, unable to move him, urges the boy's mother to persuade her son to save himself. But she, bending over him, speaks in her native tongue words that turn his persuasion on its head. She recalls carrying him in her womb and nursing him, and then points him to the God who made all things out of nothing. Do not fear this butcher, she says; accept your death, that in God's mercy I may receive you again with your brothers.

The mother's words are among the most remarkable in Scripture. She is asked to plead with her son to save his life by abandoning God; instead she pleads with him to remain faithful even to death. And she can do this because of what she believes: that God made all things out of nothing, and that in his mercy she will receive her son again beyond death, raised with his brothers. Her hope in the resurrection is so certain that she can urge her own child to die rather than deny God, confident that death is not the end, that God who created from nothing can raise the dead, that she will have her son again. It is not that she loves her son less; it is that she values his faithfulness to God above even his life, and trusts that God will restore what death takes. There is a depth of faith here that both humbles and instructs us. This mother valued her son's faithfulness to God above his very life, and could face his death, and urge it, because she believed in the resurrection: that the God who made all things from nothing would receive her son again, that death was not the final word. Her courage rested on hope, the certain hope that God raises the dead and that those who are faithful will be received again in his mercy. This is the hope that has steadied the faithful in the face of death: that death is not the end, that the God who created us can raise us, that those who lose their lives for his sake will receive them again. Women received their dead by resurrection, Hebrews says of such faith, and others endured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. The mother's confidence was in that better resurrection. And though few of us are called to what she faced, her hope is ours: that God who made all things from nothing will receive his own again beyond death, so that even death cannot finally separate us from those who are his, nor from him. Her faith invites us to value faithfulness to God above life itself, resting, as she did, on the certain hope of the resurrection.

Do I hold my own life, or the lives of those I love, so tightly that faithfulness to God seems too costly, or can I learn from this mother, who valued her son's faithfulness above his very life because she trusted that God who made all things from nothing would receive him again beyond death, and rest as she did on the certain hope of the resurrection, that death is not the final word?

Sources