Friday of Week 32 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Luke 17:26-37

Jesus is coming to the end of his public life. His passion and death are going to be traumatic experiences for his followers, which will take them by surprise and fill them with shock and alarm.

Later still, but before Luke had put his Gospel together, a cataclysm had overtaken Jerusalem when the city was laid siege to and utterly destroyed—the magnificent Temple along with it. The disaster is commemorated in the arch in Rome erected to honour the Emperor Titus’ victory, where one can see bas reliefs of the treasures of the Temple being carried off as loot.

Last of all, there is the end of all things, when our world will be no more. The what or the how of that end is something we know nothing about. In a sense, all three endings are included in Jesus’ warning today. His main lesson is for us to be ready and not to think that we can postpone our preparations. When the end strikes, it will be already too late.

Jesus gives the example of the time of the Flood, when people ate and drank right up to the moment of disaster (and we know from our own media how unprepared people can be when sudden floods and other sudden disasters strike). Similarly in the days of Lot, people were leading their ordinary lives when fire and brimstone (perhaps an earthquake?) rained down on the wicked city of Sodom. Only Lot and his family, who had been previously warned, escaped. In our time, almost every day we see something in our own media of similar cataclysms.

When “the day that the Son of Man is revealed” arrives, that is, when he comes at the end of time, it will be too late to take emergency measures. One will either be ready or not. If one is resting on the roof of one’s house (as was common at that time), don’t think of going down to save something. One person will be taken away and a companion left behind. The words seem to echo what happened at the fall of Jerusalem, and are similar to all natural disasters where some are swept away and those next to them survive. In context, the implication is that one goes to God and one does not.

These texts are not intended to fill us with fear and foreboding of a capricious God. They are timely advice not to be caught napping, but to remain alert to meet the Lord. It is good advice, not just for the end of our lives, but for every day and every moment of every day. If I am always ready now, I will be ready then.

By living continuously and consciously in the presence of God, in that ‘divine milieu’ of the Kingdom mentioned above—in the ever-present now—we are not going to be caught by surprise. Far from being afraid, we will look forward to the day with anticipation, leaving totally in God’s hands the hour of his call. In practice, too, that final call will not coincide with the end of our planet, but with the moment when our individual life on this earth will come to its end. Of the inevitability of that end, there is no doubt.

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Friday of Week 32 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Wisdom 13:1-9

Today the author mocks those who fail to find God’s presence in the world around them. Instead, they turn to idolatry and make gods of the things of nature. It is one thing to see God in everything and another to make anything a god, an object of worship. The writer attacks three forms of idolatry (only the first of which is dealt with in today’s reading): the divinisation of natural forces and heavenly bodies, the worship of man-made idols, and the worship of animals.

The author calls “ignorant” all those who are not aware of the real God in the world around them. ‘Ignorant, ‘vain’ or ‘empty’ were epithets often used of false gods. Those who devote themselves to such ‘vanities’ are ‘vain’ themselves. They do not seem to be able to discover “the one who exists” (in some translations: ‘Him-who-is’) in all the good things around them nor, by studying the wonderful works of nature, have they been able to become aware of their Designer or Artificer. ‘The one who exists’ becomes, for later Christian philosophers, the ‘Pure Being’, the unique characteristic of God as source of all that comes to be.

Other natural phenomena, instead of leading them to their Maker, are themselves made into gods—fire, wind, the constellations, the power of the sea, the sun and the moon (‘luminaries of heaven’). All these are said to govern the world. People have become hypnotised by their beauty (and sometimes frightened by their power) and so divinised them without realising how much greater their Maker must be as the original Source of such beauty and power. In terms borrowed from the Greek philosophers and to be taken up by Christian philosophers and theologians of a later age, the author tells us that the greatness and beauty of all things gives us an analogy, that is, a faint image of the greatness and beauty of the Origin of all things.

The Old Testament had praised the power and majesty of the creating God, but did not talk of the beauty of the world as a work of art. The author reveals a Greek touch here in his aesthetic sensitivity of God as artist.

And, if it is the power in these phenomena that has impressed them, why can they not come to the conclusion that He who made all these things must be so much more powerful? If the things of the world around us can dazzle us with their beauty, what must their Maker be like:

For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.

However, compared to those who have made gods of human artefacts of gold and silver (dealt with in the following section of the chapter), such people may be less guilty. They are to be commended for their search for God and their eagerness to find him. The author is sympathetic to these people’s problems. They are in search of God, of the ultimate source of meaning, but go astray by becoming dazzled by the beauty of what they see. In a sense, they cannot see the whole forest because of the beauty of this or that tree.

On the other hand, they are not without blame. If they are clever enough to make a study of the world in which they live, how come they have been so slow to find the Master that is behind all? He faults them for having proceeded so far in intellectual speculation and yet failed to come to an awareness of the God who alone gives meaning to all they see.

Later, Paul in his Letter to the Romans will also criticise those who, though without the help of revelation, fail to find God in the world around them and create gods out of material things. Later still, St Ignatius Loyola in the final contemplation of his Spiritual Exercises will urge the retreatant to consider that the truth and beauty of the things around him can be but the palest shadow of their Source. They are the signs not only of his truth and beauty, but also of his overwhelming love for us.

We, too, can be so caught up in things that we fail to see through them to the Source behind. As Teilhard de Chardin said, we live in a milieu divin (a ‘divine milieu’), in a world where everything is touched by God. He is the very air we breathe. It is a gift and a great source of peace to be consciously aware of this as we go through our day. And, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

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