Daily Reflection, June 25, 2026

Reflection:

Our first reading today sounds like our present  6.00 News.  The total destruction of Jerusalem, the obliteration of the city, its buildings and homes. The Temple, the Precious Ark of the Covenant, worship desecrated and lost forever. The nation itself, now a nation no more – no King, no Government, no Armed forces. As the US President would say: A civilisation ceased to exist.

However, Israel had ceased to exist for decades already. Idolatry, dictatorship, injustice, failed and corrupt leadership. Alliances made by self-serving monarchs and then betrayed.  Isaiah had started his warning a hundred years before the actual destruction. Jeremiah is over 40 years old,  the biblical 12 (Minor) prophets also. Ezekiel was carried away into exile and there laid bare the ways Israel had destroyed itself and allow itself to be destroyed – well before Babylon even got to their gates.

Israel may have originally been built on rock, but when the winds blew and the storms came, there was no integrity, no authenticity, there was nothing left. They were just sand pouring through Babylon’s fingers. 

Neither empires nor our own personal lives also don’t disappear in a day.  It takes years of little betrayals, little compromises, little lies, little thefts, moments of avarice, of selfishness, of deliberate ignorance.  As the wonderful German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller wrote with rare honesty:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s the small, daily, ordinary decisions that truly count. We may have built on rock, but we can wear it away till we are drifting sand, a sorry imitation of what we once were, or what we could have been.

We see it around us all the time.  It happens to nations.  It can happen to us  

Tom Mcdonough CP is the parish priest and community leader at St. Paul of the Cross, Glen Osmond.