In those days, in that time,
I will raise up for David a just shoot;
he shall do what is right and just in the land.
The prophet Jeremiah assured the Israelites, who had been exiled to Babylon in the east, that the Lord would fulfill His promise and that they would someday dwell secure back home in Jerusalem.
What is a shoot? A shoot on a tree is the growth that bears the flowering buds. The shoot helps transport water, minerals, and food to the tree. The prophet Isaiah wrote that a shoot would arise from the stump of Jesse, who was the great King David’s father.
It’s interesting: about a hundred years before King Herod the Great (not of the line of David, or any other king) came to power, a Jewish clan that had been living for centuries in Babylon, made the dangerous trek 700 miles west to Israel. They started a village in an overgrown wasteland in the Galilean hills. They called it Nazareth, which means “Village of the Shoot.”
During King Herod’s reign, the signs were becoming clearer that the shoot on Jesse’s stump was getting ready to blossom and rise up to the heavens. This blossoming would take place after about 600 years of dormancy because, when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 597 BC, they made King Zedekiah watch as all his sons were executed before his very eyes. The king’s eyes then were gouged out, so that the last thing he saw was the murder of his sons. It appeared that King David’s dynasty, which had lasted for about 500 years, had come to an end.
King David had had eight wives and eighteen children. Scholars argue these descendants lived as a clan while in exile in Babylon:
Once kings, they now plied common trades and crafts. They kept a low profile, but within the home they passed their royal identity from one generation to the next, and they kept meticulous records of the family’s genealogy.
They lived not with nostalgia, but with hope. Hope was the reason they kept the genealogies, so that the legitimate line of David could be restored at the moment of God’s intervention. They were as certain of that moment as they were of any other. It was not a speculative question of if, but a burning question of when.
This had to be the case because God, being all good, cannot lie:
I will not lie to David
His line shall endure forever.
(Ps 89)
The prophet Daniel, who lived in exile in Babylon centuries before Christ, prophesized that after “seventy weeks of years” (490 years), the Christ would begin His reign in Jerusalem. This prophecy started to reveal itself in 167 BC when the Jews revolted against their Greek masters. They drove the Greeks out of Israel, rededicated the temple, and installed a priest-king.
Jews living abroad were then instructed by the new Jewish leaders in Jerusalem to move to Israel. Many (probably most) Jews, however, did not come. The families, for example in Babylon, had lived there for 500 years. They had established roots and were comfortable with their station in life. They didn’t want to risk all they had by going “home” to a place they had never been.
But some Jews, citing Jeremiah who prophesized that the scattered tribes would be gathered and return home, did just that and returned. The returnees from the House of David bought two large tracts of land in lower Galilee—land that had been uninhabited for about six hundred years. One they named Kochba, the other Nazareth, the Village of the Shoot (see Mike Aquilina, St Joseph and His World, chapter 1).
And so, Jews who were of the line of King David saw the signs and finally returned home. Back in Israel they established themselves, among other things, as farmers, shepherds, and artisans. One of those artisans, a man from Nazareth, a couple days before He hung on a cross, spoke of signs. He spoke of signs in the sun and the moon and the stars:
For that day will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth. Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.
The Effects of Forgetting Christ is King
My friends, Jesus Christ is God. He is all good, and He is the truth. He then cannot lie. He never said there are many paths that lead to God. And He never said that God wills a diversity of religions. No, it is only through Christ that we find salvation. Jeremiah wrote that the day of judgment will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth—not just Catholics, but every person, no matter what they’ve been taught, or what they believe. It doesn’t matter. Every person will someday stand before the Son of Man.
A few weeks ago I gave a bit of history on our federal holiday known as Thanksgiving. I told people to enjoy their families and turkey and pumpkin pie, but to remember it was just Thursday. I was given the impression that some people found my remarks blasphemous. Well, they weren’t. I celebrate Thanksgiving every day at Mass. And I do so five, sometimes six times on the weekend. Do I need the federal government to tell me to celebrate Thanksgiving then? No. Do you?
In 1789 George Washington declared that Thanksgiving should be celebrated in November. He referred to God as the “great Lord and ruler of all nations.” In 1863 when Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving holiday, he called God our “beneficent father in heaven.” Both Washington and Lincoln’s proclamations are quite beautiful. But they both left something out: they left out Christ.
Our country was founded on the promise of religious freedom; the promise that our government would never mandate religion. How wonderful. We were given the freedom to do what Christ mandated us to do: we were to Christianize the country, the culture, and the whole world.
But this was a risky enterprise. Do you understand why your brothers and sisters and sons and daughters are not here today with us? If God is merely the “great Lord and ruler of all nations” then anyone can make God out to be whatever they want Him to be. He could be Mother Earth, He could be the United Nations, He could be Taylor Swift, or our ancient enemy, Satan. When our elected leaders in Washington DC give things like abortion and sodomy and castrating children sacramental status, who do you think is their “great Lord and ruler of nations?” It’s not Christ.
Calling God a “ruler of nations” and “beneficent father” while ignoring Christ sounds a bit Masonic, as in Freemasonry, a deeply anti-Christ institution.
So now what should we do?
What we should not do is remain comfortable with our present station here in this land of exile. Instead, let us deny ourselves and make heroic sacrifice on our trek back to a home in which we have never been—our true home, the heavenly Jerusalem, where we will dwell secure forever.
The ancient Jews, the descendants of King David, kept meticulous records of the past, to help them read current events and signs. Our enemies within and without the Church have been doing their worst to have us forget our past, decimating things like sacred architecture and music and our liturgy.
We have to fight for these things, not just out of nostalgia for the past, but for hope for the future. You see, when we look at our past we understand our royal identity—an identity not due to biological blood, but mystical Blood that flows from the shoot on the tree of Calvary; the shoot that feeds and sustains us.
My friends, our King arrived as a helpless baby, He worked as an artisan, and He died as the Lamb of God. And He—and no one else—will return as our Judge. That is not a speculative question of if, but a burning question of when.
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
