This week, our first readings are taken from the book of Tobit. This short book is full of moral lessons, explicit and implicit. It shows that God rewards those who serve Him faithfully. However, often they must first pass through many trials, as happens to the people in this book. The book was probably written in Aramaic, in the common language of the Far East in the time before Alexander the Great, the language that became the common language of the Jews. Although it was probably written in this language, only a few fragments of it survive in that language. In them, Tobit is called Tobi, which is short for Tobia.
If this is correct, then both the father and the son could have been called Tobia, because in the Vulgate translation, both are called Tobias, which would correspond or certainly could correspond to Tobia. This name means, my good is God, and that was certainly a name that the elder Tobia or Tobit lived up to. He was willing to risk his life to worship God and observe the law. He was of the tribe of Naphtali, one of the Northern Ten Tribes that refused to serve Solomon's son, and therefore broke off and formed a separate kingdom of Israel. Their first king set up alternative temples in the far north and south of his kingdom, where a bull idol was worshipped, so the people would not go to Jerusalem. Thus, by frequenting Jerusalem, they come to return to serve the Davidic king and get rid of their own rebel king. This king led his subjects into apostasy from the faith in order to obtain his own personal safety for this political motive. Tobit or Tobia, who was born perhaps almost 200 years after this, instead went to the true temple in Jerusalem. He did not follow the apostasy into which his people had fallen, but at the risk of being considered a traitor, he worshipped the true God. He brought his tithes to Jerusalem. So, if he had to choose between obeying the king and obeying God, he would choose obedience to God because, as his name says, my good is God. To lose God would be to lose his true good.
Even though he was faithful to God, his fellow citizens were not. Because of this, eventually, God permitted the Assyrians to conquer the northern kingdom of Israel. They led off the people into exile because that was how they organized their empire, how they kept peace in their empire, by relocating people from one land they conquered to another land, by moving them all over, mixing them up. They wouldn't have any more of their original ethnic identity and form a rebel kingdom. So, Tobit was led into exile, not for his own sins, but for the sins of his people, and he lived in Nineveh. Many of his fellow Israelites ate the food of the Gentiles, but Tobit ate only what the law of Moses allowed.
This kind of acceptance of local customs was what would eventually cause the northern tribes to become the lost tribes of Israel. Basically, they lost their Jewish identity. They failed to preserve their Jewish identity and so they disappeared into the melting pot. Those who are their descendants today don't know that they're their descendants because there's no way to trace it anymore, except for a very few who did retain their Jewish identity.
For a time, it seemed that God rewarded Tobit with material well-being for his faithfulness to him. He found favor with the king of Assyria. He went on business trips for him and became a wealthy man. In his prosperity, he did not forget the needy. He fed the hungry, clothed the naked, buried the dead. He gave alms. But eventually, a new king replaced the old one, and this king tried to conquer Jerusalem, but God stopped him by sending an angel to destroy his army, to slay his army, because the Davidic king was, for the most part, faithful to God.
He turned to God in his distress, and God delivered him, delivered the city of Jerusalem.
So the king returned to Nineveh, that is, the Assyrian king returned to Nineveh in a rage, and he killed many Israelites as a kind of revenge for this, and threw their bodies outside the wall in the garbage heap. When Tobit saw these bodies, he carried them away and buried them properly. But the king saw that the bodies were missing, and so he wanted to punish whoever had taken these bodies, and the Ninevite told the king who was responsible.
So Tobit, too, learned that the authorities were looking for him, and so he fled the city with his wife and son, leaving behind all his property, which was confiscated. So now for doing works of mercy, he had lost everything that he had, at least everything except for his wife and son. But this did not last long. Forty days later, the evil king was assassinated by two of his sons, and Tobit was able to return to Nineveh and recover his property.
And this brings us to what's related in today's reading. Tobit has been happily returned to his property, and he has gone through the Feast of Weeks, and now it is time for the Feast of Pentecost, the Jewish Feast of Pentecost. And looking at the spread, he thinks of his fellow Jews, and some of them also serve God faithfully, but they don't have this kind of prosperity. Unlike him, they're poor. So why not reward one of those poor men for his faithfulness to God by letting him share in all this good food? So he sends his son to go find a righteous poor man. But his festival is turned into mourning when Tobias finds a murdered Jew instead. Heedless of the danger, Tobit immediately recovers the body, hides it until sunset, and then buries it. But his neighbors learn of this, and so his work of mercy earns him criticism from his neighbors, and tomorrow we'll see what else will befall him. So in these events, we can discern God training Tobit in holiness. At first, he was protected from all danger because he was small and weak in virtue. He went from the northern kingdom of Israel to Jerusalem regularly without being caught. We could say that God built a hedge around him. But unlike the wicked tenants in the parable in today's Gospel, he gave that God his due. He did have to go into exile with his people, but there his faithfulness to the law and his works of mercy brought even material rewards. And this encouraged him to keep doing that. And so he grew in virtue and became stronger. Eventually, he was strong enough in virtue to bear a trial. He had a brush with death, and he only escaped at the cost of all his property. But this trial, though it was very hard, did not last long. Afterwards, he proved that he had borne this trial well by being unafraid to continue to bury the dead, the very thing that had gotten him into trouble before. But if God had gotten him out of trouble, then God would get him out of trouble yet again. The trial had made him only more virtuous. And so now he is ready for another and even graver trial, which, as we will see tomorrow. So in this way, by alternating prosperity and adversity, God helps his servants to grow in virtue and holiness and heap up rewards for eternal life. In this book, besides the many fairly more or less obvious moral lessons, and even explicit moral teachings, we also have a symbolic meaning that's seen by the followers of the Church, and especially by St. Bede, who wrote a work, a sort of brief commentary on it. He sees in the book, many things that prefigure the events of the Jewish people and the Christian people. So for example, perhaps we could even call him St. Tobit. But anyway, Tobit was persecuted by an evil king, as the Church is persecuted by the devil. But after 40 days, the evil king was destroyed by two of his own sons, was killed by two of his own sons.
And so we have 40 days of Lent. And at the end of the 40 days of Lent, or even before our period of fasting ends, we celebrate the passion of our Lord. And that was the circumstance in which the devil was destroyed by his own offspring, as it were, by plans that he himself had hatched. He decided to kill Christ, and that was his undoing. And so we can see in these events even more lessons, and perhaps St. Bede will help us to discover more of these in the days to come. Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.

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