Who are you and who am I?

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Luke 17: 26-37) contains several alarming descriptions of the end of the world, and yet in another way, these descriptions are as enigmatic as all prophet texts. First, Jesus looks back and evokes the experience of the people who lived at the time of the flood, and then reflects on the events that preceded the destruction of Sodom. So, it will also be in the days of the Son of Man, He observes. Next, Jesus evokes the drama of those who will face that end-of-the-world moment, and how they will know the sudden sundering of the human race in two: then, there will be one taken, and another one left. Finally, He ends with yet another enigmatic reference: where the body is, there too will the vultures gather. Other translations render this differently and refer to eagles. How are we to know how to read the implications of such a text?

Yet, like all texts of Sacred Scripture, this mysterious passage begins to yield when we approach it with two fundamental questions in mind: who are you, O Lord my God, and who am I? For knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves are the two lights which make sense of the reality of the universe and help us prepare to hear His call and receive His friendship.

Who are you, O Lord my God? You are a God of just desserts and rewards, punishing as well as rewarding. It is unfashionable to speak of this, but we should reflect on the fact that the word for hell is mentioned more often in the gospel than the word for heaven. Would it be so, if this were not a possibility? Unless we do penance, we shall all likewise perish, Jesus tells us in Luke 13: 3.

But this God of justice is also a God of revelation and redemption who has sent His Son, and the Son will come again in due course to complete the great cycle in which mankind is led back to God, or at least that portion of mankind that has not definitively rejected Him. Still, what are we to make of the suddenness of His action? God seems to deal with things not in our time but in His own. Whole centuries seem to pass with chaos ensuing, only for a crisis to provoke precipitous collapse and judgement. Jesus evokes the sudden interventions of God in this passage, as well as the precision of His judgements that differentiate the fate of one human from that of another. Everything is in His hands. If we fear and tremble, we do no less than obey the command of St Paul in working out our salvation. And, yet, at the same time, we hear the voice of Jesus: be not afraid. Like all paradoxes of the faith, it is not one that we should try to resolve in one sense or the other; God is three and one, Jesus is God and man, Mary is Virgin and Mother, we should be afraid and not afraid: let us hold the paradox in prayer and our ignorance in humility. Only by the gifts of the Holy Spirit is human fear properly driven out, while a divinely-inspired fear of the Lord continues to move us.

From there, we come to our second question: who am I? Am I one of those who wants to look back with Lot’s wife, or to flee with Lot? Am I one of those whose taste for eating, drinking, buying and selling prevails over my taste for coming to the Lord in prayer and humble love? Am I the kind of soul who returns to their house for their possessions, rather than turning their hearts towards the Lord’s temple? Who am I before these choices?

In a sense, the answer to the first question about God provides the answer to the second question about us, without being able to solve it for this or that individual who is still a wayfarer in this vale of tears. If God is our maker, our redeemer and the spouse of our souls, there should only remain in us the fear of offending Him, just as we fear to hurt anyone we love. But this dilemma casts light upon what we are truly attached to, and upon who we are in this moment: for by its light are our secret attachments – and, thereby, all our secret fears – driven out into the open, revealed in their abjectness, exposed in our lifelong capacity for betrayal of God and of ourselves. By refusing to let go of our false selves – our deluded self-image – we are like those who try to preserve what we think life is, rather than accepting to die like the grain of wheat…

And here we discover whether our abjectness is true humility or unhealthy abasement: for humility liberates us to cast ourselves into the arms of the Lord who comes to our aid and hastens to help us, while abasement enslaves us to self-hatred, serving for the soul a dish of disappointed vanity that tries to find some self-respect in sterile self-inflicted pain.

Let us fear only that the vultures attend upon those who depart this life dead in sin. And let us also take heart for we are His body, His mystical body, and our lives are hidden with Christ in God whose grace can overcome our mistaken pride to bring us back to Himself by helping us become who we are meant to be.