2 Kings 18:3
And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that David his father had done.
Today’s verse preserves a basic idea that haunted the mind of antiquity: that we were not as good as our ancestors and that one touchstone for a life well lived was to have done as well as one’s fathers and mothers in obeying the Lord. Hezekiah came from a long line of kings who rejected and compromised the faith of their father David. Yet he tried hard to restore what they had destroyed with their neglect and he was honored by God for it. In our time, with the rise of Baby Boomers, the whole notion of reverence for the previous generation likewise went away for some forty years as the most narcissistic generation in the history of the world dismissed first its elders, then its children, as being somehow fools or disappointments and exalted itself as the summit of human history and the apex of all that was good and right. However, as Generation X and the Millennial Generation begins to take its place on the world scene, one of the remarkable things to happen has been their growing tendency to look backward, past the self-absorbed generation of Boomers and see, once again, how our ancestors did things and to seek the Faith of our grandparents and great-grandparents. This is, in part, the attraction that Pope John Paul II (and the entire World War II generation) had for today’s youth: they were willing to live and die for something higher than themselves. Today, look back to the faithfulness of our ancestors and thank God that a new generation is rising to carry on the Faith despite our human failures.
