Luke 17:26-37
Today’s Gospel continues the reflection on the coming of the end of time and presents to us the words of Jesus about how to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Kingdom. Once, a young man approached his spiritual director with a serious question and said: “Father, I would like to offer my last day in life totally to God. What would you advise me to do?
The Spiritual director answered: “Go ahead, my son, offer the whole of your last day to God. That is very praiseworthy thing to do. The Young man said: “But how can I, Father? I don’t know when my last day will come. The Spiritual director responded: That is simple, Offer every single day of your life to God. That way you will be sure you will also be offering your last day.
A matter of being prepared for one’s last day on earth is not easy. Today Jesus gives us the example of the days of Noah and of Lot, people were caught unprepared for their last day. They were utterly destroyed: Those in the days of Noah by the Deluge, those in the days of Lot by fire and brimstone. Why were they so unprepared? What were they doing then? Jesus says they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building marrying and giving in marriage. In short, they were in the very act of living. And they were not counting on being intercepted by death at any point in time at all. The point here is that routine can include so much that we do not succeed to think about anything else. And the consumerism of the neo-liberal system contributes to increase in many of us that total lack of attention to the more profound dimensions of life. We allow the moths to enter into the beam of faith which holds up the more profound dimensions of life.
Jesus calls us to lose one’s life in order to save it. Only the person who has been capable of giving himself/herself completely to others will feel totally fulfilled in life. Anyone who preserves life for self alone loses it. This advice of Jesus is the confirmation of the most profound human experience: the source of life is found in the gift of life. In giving one receives. “In all truth I tell you: unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain, but if it dies it yields a rich harvest”. (Jn 12, 24). The motivation which Mark’s Gospel adds is important: “for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel” (Mk 8, 35). Saying that no one is capable of preserving his life by his own efforts, Jesus recalls the Psalm in which it is said that nobody is capable of paying the price for the ransom of his life: “No one can redeem himself or pay his own ransom to God. The price for himself is too high, it can never be that he will live on for ever and avoid the sight of the abyss”. (Ps 49, 8-10).
The gospel seems to paint doom and destruction; but if we look deeper it is an invitation to a life of faith: to repent from self-centered way of living to a life centered in God. What gives us security is not to know the hour of the end of the world, but the certainty of the presence of the Words of Jesus present in our life.
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