Readings:
Tobit 11-14
2 Thessalonians 2

Tobit 11-14

Tobias gets close to Nineveh and Raphael reminds him about the fish’s gallbladder and they run ahead to see his father. When he sees him and applies the gall to his eyes it removes the white scales and he sees his only child again. It’s very reminiscent of Zachariah regaining his ability to speak when his son was born. This was a suffering that was placed upon Tobit to bring greater glory to God, like the man born blind in John.

Tobias and his father get together to discuss how much they should pay his companion, and they agree that he was invaluable to this whole mission and Tobias suggested giving him half of what he brought back from his trip, and Tobit agrees. They could’ve just paid him exactly what they agreed to before the trip, but they’re both honest and honorable men and agree his help was worth so much more. But they won’t have to pay him anything because he finally reveals his true identity to them, and exhorts them to continually praise God.

Tobit gives his family some more good advice when he tells them to leave Nineveh. The city is completely destroyed by the up and coming Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar not to far off, and by heading east they’ll escape that fate. He also foretells the destruction of the temple and the city of Jerusalem. And he prophecies the rebuilding of both.

If we drill down in his description of the rebuilt temple he says it won’t be as great as the former one, until “the time of the ages are complete” but then they’ll all return to Jerusalem and build the city and temple to its greatest glory that will last forever. To me the first part sounds like the timeframe is leading up to the destruction of the temple in 70AD. The second part sounds like a partial description of the church as the new temple in the kingdom of God. This prophecy includes the gentiles turning to God, joining the Jews in worshipping God and abandoning all their idols.

2 Thessalonians 2

Paul is trying to calm them down here because apparently not only did false teachers try to deceive them, someone also forged letters claiming to be apostolic and saying that Jesus had already returned. He tells them he is returning, but that there’s a few things that must happen first.

Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

CCC 675

He reminds them of his previous teachings about a great apostasy and the rising of an extraordinarily evil leader. This leader is sometimes conflated with the antichrist and the beast of revelation, but scholars disagree on that. We’ll talk about the beast more when we get to revelation, but the “man of lawlessness” and rage antichrist seems like the same figure.

Paul makes a very important point here at the end of the chapter, not that any of his points are unimportant. He reminds them to cling to the teachings of the apostles, both written and oral. Remember that the first books in what we now call the New Testament were written down in the early 50s, but the church was founded around twenty years earlier. So for those twenty years they had nothing but the oral tradition, and this continued on in the Church.

The apostles did not hand down everything in writing; many unwritten things were handed down as well, and both written and unwritten are worthy of belief. So let us also regard the tradition of the Church as worthy of belief.

John Chrysostom

Tomorrow’s Readings:
Esther 1-2
2 Thessalonians 3