THE NOW WORD ON MASS READINGS
for January 16th, 2014
Liturgical texts here
IT looked like the perfect comeback. The Israelites had just been soundly defeated by the Philistines, and so the first reading says they came up with a brilliant idea:
Let us fetch the ark of the LORD from Shiloh that it may go into battle among us and save us from the grasp of our enemies.
After all, with all that happened in Egypt and the plagues, and the reputation of the ark, the Philistines would be terrorized at the idea. And they were. So when the Israelites marched into battle, they thought they had that fight in the books. Instead…