Vermin

Jesus said to the crowd: "They will seize and persecute you, they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons, and they will have you led before kings and governors because of my name. It will lead to your giving testimony. 

Remember, you are not to prepare your defense beforehand, for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute. You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed. By your perseverance you will secure your lives." (Luke 21:12-19)

The authorities didn’t like Jesus.  They feared his attack on Jewish purity rules and his opposition to Roman rule and oppression.  Jewish leaders and lackeys to their Roman overlords knew he was trouble and threatened their positions of power.  He and his growing number of followers had to be stopped. They were seized and persecuted; they were handed over to the synagogues and to prisons.  Such was their tenuous existence.  But they persevered despite their adversaries.

Consider the inordinate pressure on Jesus’s followers: “You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.” How many of us could withstand that sort of resistance to following Jesus?  Not many of us I suspect.

How many Jews stand by their faith and heritage when they are hated just because they are Jews?  I suspect most.  Antisemitism is on the rise, and fascist behavior is becoming common, even the use of Nazi rhetoric such as labelling adversaries as “vermin.”   

At the risk of sounding political – and I’m not in this case – I reference this article by John Cassidy in New Yorker Magazine: “Trump’s Fascistic Rhetoric Only Emphasizes the Stakes in 2024 As he leads the polls nearly a year out from Election Day, the former President is taking the sort of hateful language that in the past he’s used about immigrants and applying it to his political enemies." Fascism is antichrist philosophy and must be resisted and called out for what it is.  It is completely contrary to our Catholic beliefs and Jesus’s commandments. It is evil.  

(begin) In his Veterans Day speech, Trump described his political opponents as “vermin,” and praised the governing styles of Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán. Donald Trump talks a lot of trash, of course. But three days after his campaign appearance in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday, some of the words he used are still reverberating. At the end of a long and rambling speech, Trump said the following: “In honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible; they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and to destroy the American Dream.” 

If the phrase “live like vermin within the confines of our country” sounds vaguely familiar, it should. In February, 1933, days after Adolf Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany, Wilhelm Kube, a Nazi politician, wrote in a propaganda publication, as reported at the time by the Jewish Daily Bulletin: “The Jews, like vermin, form a line from Potsdamerplatz until Anhalter Banhof. . . . The only way to smoke out the vermin is to expel them.” In 1936, when Oswald Mosley’s British Fascists were harassing Jews in London’s East End, they referred to them as “rats and vermin from the gutters of Whitechapel.” Hitler himself used similar language more than once. In a 1934 interview, he said, “If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!” (end)

We must have wisdom supporting our beliefs so all our adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute us. Moreover, we need our Jesus-described wisdom to beware of hypocrites and thieves, and “Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:43-45).  Serving others is not a trait of fascists, and certainly not Nazis or those who talk and act like them.

Deacon David Pierce