We hear in Today's Gospel, “Of two men in the fields, one is taken, one is left; of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left.”
This could mean that one is taken away by a natural or personal disaster (an earthquake or a heart attack) and the other left untouched. Or it could mean that God takes one away to himself and abandons the other. In either event, the basic meaning is the same. Two men, two women on the outside apparently the same, doing the same work. And yet there is an important difference between them. One is prepared and one is not.
Of course, in our daily lives we have to work, cook food, earn our living, take care of our families… but we must also prepare for the final call. That is the most basic reality of our lives. If we forget that, all our other success is actually failure. Let us remember the story of Martha and Mary. Martha was so busy about good things, about taking care of others but it was Mary who was in the right place, in touch with the centre of meaning, the Word made flesh.
And we do not know when the Lord will come. “If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into…” And, in many ways, it is a blessing that we do not know the day nor the hour.
On the one hand, if we did know, we could be filled with a terrible anxiety knowing what the final blow was going to be or, on the other hand, we would let our lives go completely to pot knowing that we could straighten everything out at the last minute. In either case, our world would become a terrible place in which to live.
So it is a question of being ready for any eventuality. “Stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming…”
The obvious question to ask is, How are we to prepare? St Paul today in the Second Reading has some advice. “Let us give up all the things we tend to do under cover of darkness and live decently as people do in the daytime.” I guess there are dark areas in all of our lives. Things we do, things we say, things we think, the indulging of our lower and self-centred appetites; things which we would not like other people to know about because they are quite wrong. They do no good to me or to others.
Instead, we need to develop our relations with God and with our brothers and sisters based on a caring and unconditional love for all. We need to learn how to find God, to find Jesus in every person, in every experience. We need to respect every person as the image of God. We are to love our neighbours as ourselves, to love everyone just as Jesus loved us.
If, in our words and actions, our daily lives are full of the spirit of Jesus, then we have prepared. We do not need to be anxious about the future or what will happen to us. Concentrate on today, on the present hour, the present situation and respond to it in truth and love and the future will take care of itself. Then we do not have to fear no matter when Jesus makes his final call.
Because we know he is going to say: “Come, my friend. I want to call you now; I want to share with you my life that never ends.” And we will respond: “Yes, Lord, I am ready. I have been waiting for you all this time.” It will be an encounter, not of strangers, but of two old friends.
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