In both readings today in our liturgy, from Isaiah and Matthew, kingdoms, cities, towns are brought down. Though powerful, permanent and blessed by God  they fall into the dust. Isaiah describes the fall of Jerusalem. Matthew’s Gospel describes the fall of towns along the Sea of Galilee, like Capernaum and Corazin, where Jesus taught and worked wonders, yet they abandon  him.

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.  Galilee, where Jesus lived most of his life and years of ministry,  became the center of Pharasaic Judaism; exiles from Judea displaced  Jewish Christians from the towns and synagogues of Galilee. Jesus was considered an enemy there. The towns where he taught and worked wonders no longer welcomed him. .

We look for lasting cities, but our readings today remind us earthly cities are not lasting, They change and sometimes disappear. “He came to his own and his own received him not”, St. John says.  Paul writes extensively in the 9th Chapter of Romans about the mystery of rejection Jesus faced from his own people. Look to the mercy of God, he says. 

We wonder about his rejection in our own towns and places.  We wonder about the future of Christianity in our part of the world. Will it disappear?

The psalms in the liturgy offer God’s message to our readings, as Psalm 48  does today: 

“God upholds his city forever. Great is the LORD and wholly to be praised
in the city of our God.
His holy mountain, fairest of heights, is the joy of all the earth.
Mount Zion…is the city of the great King.
God is with her castles; renowned is he as a stronghold.”

The times we live in have their storms like those that destroyed the ships of Tarshish, but time is like a woman in labor. Sometime new is being born and we don’t see it yet.