Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C
Reflecting on Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2: 2-4
That Habakkuk reading today is too close to home. The prophet writes, “How long, O LORD? I cry for help, but you do not listen!”
I heard the cry of those brave Evergreen High School students who said, “My whole life, my whole childhood, was devoted to keeping me safe from a school shooter. And he came for us anyway.” And, of course, the horrific shooting during the first school Mass of the year at Annunciation grade school in Minneapolis is too terrible to recount, too tragic to remember.
How many of us, though, as we watched in horror, silently said to God, “I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?”
Habakkuk has a front row seat to the impending misery about to be visited upon Israel. He can see the Babylonian army marching towards Israel. He dreads the violence, the bloodshed, the loss of life that surely marches into Israel with King Nebuchadnezzar.
He demands that God give him an answer. WHY do you allow such violence, especially at the hands of evildoers? In fact, a third of the population died by the sword, a third by fire, and the last third was taken into exile. God tells Habakkuk to wait, that the vision written on the tablet will surely come. Seventy years later, long after Habakkuk’s death, the vision was realized. The captives came home.
But will it take seventy years for the vision of a nation where schools are havens of safety and learning to be realized? We can do better. That, I think, is what’s written on the tablet.
In what ways are you advocating for gun safety?
Kathy McGovern ©2025