My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in today’s readings we hear from the prophet Malachi, the last of the prophets to write during the Old Testament era. His writings date from around 450 to 430 years before the birth of Christ. Malachi spoke during a period after the people of God had returned from the Babylonian exile, at the beginning of the reconstruction of the Temple—a project set in motion by the Persian King Cyrus, who had liberated them from Babylonian domination.