Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets
whom your fathers killed.
It is rather easy to celebrate the lives of saints with icons and images. It is rather more difficult to actually live as they did. We say we respect Padre Pio. But would we go anywhere near the line for his confessional? We may claim to love Saint Francis. But would we actually be as happy to hear him tell us about our unhealthy materialistic attachments? Saints seem safe as long as our appreciation for them remains to be merely aesthetic. Are we in fact building their memorials to keep them confined and lifeless in the past? This seems to be the criticism Jesus leveled at those who built memorials to the prophets in his own day. They claimed to honor them. But they were actually aligned with those who had acted against the prophets throughout history. And they would themselves demonstrate this opposition by acting against the one who would sum up in himself all of the prophets. Prophets had spoken in varied and partial ways. But in Jesus, God spoke to humanity through his Son (see Hebrews 1:1-2). Because Jesus was rejected by the generation to which he came they would not only be charged with his blood, but with the blood of all the prophets, since he summed up all of them in himself. This would be true of those who were obviously implicated in the death of Jesus at the time. But no one, excluding Mary, lived so completely without sin as to never act in a way that represented a rejection of Jesus and the line of prophetic voices he fulfilled. We too have done things for which justice would require that we were charged for his blood. But fortunately, even while we were enemies, Christ chose to die for us to free us from this guilt (see Romans 5:10).
In Christ we have redemption by his Blood,
the forgiveness of transgressions,
in accord with the riches of his grace that he lavished upon us.
Christ received in himself the summed up form of the hostility of humanity against God. But he also summed up himself something better. All of the promises that were more or less explicit throughout the history of creation were fully realized in him. He was the one in whom every promise found its 'Yes' (see Second Corinthians 1:20). He put death and sin to death on the cross. And a new possibility of life, in union with him, was born from his resurrection.
Woe to you, scholars of the law!
You have taken away the key of knowledge.
You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.
Because of what Jesus has done for us we must do better than adorning our houses with memorials of saints. He has given the keys to his Kingdom to Peter and his successors. So we should make sure that the saints actually influence our lives and not just our decor. We should make sure that we don't just sit and look at the Kingdom but that we actually enter and invite others to do the same.
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