Scripture Daily

Context No. 419 of 4322 · 1 Maccabees

Context · Reflection

1 Maccabees 13:36-40: in context

36“King Demetrius to Simon the high priest and friend of kings, and to the elders and nation of the Jews, greetings. 37The golden crown and the palm branch, which you sent, we have received. We are ready to make a steadfast peace with you, yes, and to write to our officers to release you from tribute. 38Whatever things we confirmed to you, they are confirmed. The strongholds, which you have built, let them be your own. 39As for any oversights and faults committed to this day, we forgive them, and the crown tax which you owed us. If there were any other tax collected in Jerusalem, let it be collected no longer. 40If any among you are qualified to be enrolled in our court, let them be enrolled, and let there be peace between us.”

This short royal letter marks a milestone that generations of Jews had bled for. King Demetrius writes to Simon, now the high priest, and grants what amounts to independence: a firm peace, the confirmation of the strongholds they had built, the forgiveness of past faults, and, most importantly, release from tribute, the yearly payments that had marked their subjection to foreign kings. We are ready to release you from the tribute, the king writes. The yoke that had sat on the nation's neck for as long as anyone could remember was, with a stroke of the pen, lifted. After decades of struggle, Judea was free.

It is worth pausing on who was not there to read the letter. This freedom did not arrive in a single dramatic moment. It was the end of a long, costly fight that had consumed a whole family. Simon's brother Judas Maccabeus had died in battle years before. His brother Jonathan had been captured and killed. Their father Mattathias, who started the resistance, was long dead. Simon is the one who lives to see the tribute finally lifted, but the freedom he receives was purchased across a generation by the lives of the people who came before him and did not survive to enjoy it. He holds in his hands a liberty that his brothers paid for with their blood and never got to taste.

That is the quiet weight underneath the celebration, and it turns a light on how I hold my own freedoms. Almost everything I enjoy freely, the securities and liberties and goods that simply feel like the normal state of things, was won at a cost by people who came before me, many of whom never saw the result of their struggle. Simon at least knew what it had cost. Do I even remember, or do I receive freedoms that others died for as though they were simply mine by default, taking for granted the tribute someone else's blood removed from my neck?

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