Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Looking at today’s gospel passage (Luke 17:26-37) alongside yesterday’s gospel reading, which is the five preceding verses (20-25), I found myself a bit confused. Yesterday’s gospel passage is basically saying the Kingdom of God is “among you” and it “cannot be observed.” Now today in the verses following yesterday’s we hear about what some have referred to as “the Rapture”, which has been dramatized in books and movies, such as Left Behind (which I have not personally read or seen) about how on that night, “one will be taken, the other left.” And today’s passage ends with the ominous response to the disciples’ question of “Where, Lord?”: “Where the body is, there also the vultures will gather.”
In the midst of these dramatic, even somewhat cryptic, verses, however, is a verse that stands out to me as consistent with Jesus’ message throughout the Scriptures, “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it.” (17:33)
For some guidance I turned to the writings of a renowned New Testament professor, Gerhard Lohfink, as found in his book, All My Springs Are In You: More Explorations of Great Biblical Texts. I would like to share some of his words about the Kingdom or “Reign of God” as related to this message of losing our life in order to save it:
“We must not think that his (Jesus’) proclamation of the reign of God and his death on the cross are two completely different things that have nothing to do with each other.... The reign of God will not come without persecutions; it will not come without sacrifices. Indeed, it will not come without our dying daily.... Ultimately, Jesus’ death uncovers all the self-glorification of the human and so also every superficial and presumptuous conception of the reign of God. The reign of God happens where human beings come up against their limits, where they no longer know, as they hand themselves over, what space they are making available for God alone, so God can act. Only there, in the zone of constant dying and rising, the reign of God begins.”
Let us pray for each other in our daily dying and rising, allowing God to act, to reign, in our lives, in our world.
—Eileen Miller