1 Maccabees 7:1–4

1 Maccabees 7:1 — "In the one hundred and fifty-first year" The dating by the Seleucid Era (placing this event in approximately 161 BC) is characteristic of 1 Maccabees' careful historical method. Unlike 2 Maccabees, which is more theological and parenetic in style, 1 Maccabees reads like a chronicle, grounding sacred history in real time and geopolitics. Demetrius I Soter was the son of Seleucus IV Philopator and had been sent to Rome as a hostage — a common practice of imperial diplomacy. He escaped Roman custody (Polybius and the Roman historian Appian both record this) and landed "at a city by the sea," traditionally identified as Tripolis in Phoenicia. The phrase "went up with a few men" is historically significant: his authority rested not on military might at this moment but on dynastic legitimacy. He was a Seleucid by blood, and that was sufficient to set events in motion.

1 Maccabees 7:2 — "The army laid hands on Antiochus and Lysias" Antiochus V Eupator, son of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, was a child king whose reign had been managed by the regent Lysias — the same Lysias who had warred against Judas Maccabeus (cf. 1 Macc 4–6). The army's immediate compliance with Demetrius reveals the thin legitimacy of Antiochus V: a minor on the throne, propped up by a regent whose own power was contested. The soldiers "laid hands on" (ἐπελάβοντο) Antiochus and Lysias — a verb that implies seizure and restraint. The passive role of the child king is poignant: he is not even an actor in the scene of his own deposition. History moves around him and over him.

1 Maccabees 7:3 — "Don't show me their faces!" This is the most psychologically charged line in the cluster. Demetrius's command is theatrically brutal. Some commentators read it as a form of plausible deniability — a king who never technically ordered an execution. But the Catholic tradition, attentive to the moral weight of implicit commands, sees no such absolution here. His words function precisely as a death warrant: by refusing to see their faces, he refuses to grant them the one act that might have stayed his soldiers' hands — personal recognition of their humanity. The gesture echoes, in dark inversion, the biblical importance of "seeing the face" of another as an act of mercy and judgment (cf. Gen 33:10; Ps 27:8). To refuse to see a face is to refuse to reckon with a person.

1 Maccabees 7:4 — "The army killed them. Then Demetrius sat upon the throne." The syntactic juxtaposition is devastating in its terseness. Two people are murdered; a king is enthroned. The narrative offers no pause, no lament. This is the grammar of political violence: killing and coronation as a single, seamless act. The throne Demetrius occupies is now literally built upon corpses — including that of a child. For the author of 1 Maccabees, this is the world in which the Maccabees must operate: a world of empires that devour their own, where legitimacy is established at sword-point. The implicit theological point is that such power is, by its nature, unstable — and the rest of the book will demonstrate exactly that.

Catholic tradition has consistently engaged with passages like this not as theological embarrassments but as unflinching testimony to the reality of sin's effects in political life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them" (CCC 1869). The scene of Demetrius, Antiochus V, and Lysias is a compressed illustration of this dynamic: one man's ambition draws others into complicity (the soldiers), consumes the innocent (the child king), and entrenches further cycles of violence.

St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book V), argues that earthly kingdoms built without justice are nothing but "large-scale robberies" (magna latrocinia) — a judgment that casts a long shadow over this passage. The Seleucid throne, obtained through escape, opportunism, and the blood of a minor, exemplifies the civitas terrena at its most nakedly self-serving.

The Church Fathers were also attentive to the implicit command as morally equivalent to direct action. St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies, frequently reflects on the sin of those who engineer evil through suggestion rather than direct command — a principle later enshrined in Catholic moral theology's treatment of cooperation in evil (cf. CCC 1868). Demetrius's "Don't show me their faces" is a paradigm case: formal cooperation through deliberate blindness.

Finally, the deuterocanonical status of 1 Maccabees, affirmed at the Council of Trent (1546) and reaffirmed in Dei Verbum (§11), means this passage belongs fully to the inspired canon and bears witness to providential history: even in the chaos of pagan succession, God's people (the Maccabees) are being preserved for a purpose.

Demetrius's refusal to see the faces of Antiochus and Lysias is a spiritual posture Catholics are called to resist in their own lives. In an age of abstraction — where decisions about people are made through screens, statistics, and organizational charts — the temptation to manage outcomes without confronting their human cost is pervasive. This passage challenges Catholic leaders in business, medicine, law, government, and even parish life to resist the "don't show me their faces" instinct: the deliberate avoidance of knowledge that would create moral inconvenience.

Catholic Social Teaching, rooted in the dignity of the human person (CCC 1700–1706), insists that every human being has a face that must be seen — that moral agency cannot be outsourced to institutional momentum. Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§49), warns against a "globalization of indifference" that numbs us to the suffering our decisions cause. Demetrius embodies that indifference with chilling efficiency.

Practically: examine where in your life you are refusing to "see the face" of someone your choices affect. The refugee. The employee. The unborn child. The elderly parent. Seeing the face is the beginning of conscience.