Whoever Seeks to Preserve His Life will Lose It"

Today's Mass Readings

The popular Left Behind series, which began as novels and became low-budget films, has made quite a lot out of the passage described in today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke. This is a perfect example of why we must be careful to read the Bible with the Church, and not follow the latest fad on the bestsellers list. According to the Left Behind series, at some point in the future Jesus will return, and those who are taken away will be the Christians who follow Christ, whereas those who are left behind are the ones who will be destroyed in God’s judgment, or perhaps given a second chance to repent and turn back to God during the great tribulation on earth. In today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, the text is ambiguous as to who actually gets taken and who gets left. Of course, the only thing that explicitly gets “left behind” are ones belongings (Luke 17:31). The example Jesus gives that provides the clues to the passage’s interpretation is that of Noah and the Flood. The language used here, though, does not include “taken” or “left.” But, in the parallel passage from the Gospel of Matthew (24:36-41), that language is applied to Noah and the Flood. And there we read that Noah and his family were really the ones left (as implied in the text), whereas the rest of the people “did not know until the flood came and carried them all away,” or as the Protestant translation, the NIV, reads, “they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away” (Matthew 24: 39). Those taken away are taken away in judgment, those left behind are saved, as was Noah and his family from the flood. But as important, and equally overlooked, is the fact that Jesus is here speaking about His coming, not simply at the end.

In the Greek text, in Luke, we have the discussion of when Jesus is “unveiled,” and in Matthew, of his “presence” (Parousia). Both of these point to the Eucharist. The great unveiling (which in Greek is simply the word apocalypse) is what we find in the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of John, literally, the Unveiling. We find Jesus, looking like a lamb as though slain. This points us to the Eucharist. There is a coming of Jesus, the unveiling of His presence, at every Eucharist, which points in a special way to the very end of the world. Indeed, in the famous Road to Emmaus story, in Luke 24, the disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, and then Jesus disappears, since He is present to them in the Eucharistic bread (Luke 24:13-35). Jesus is unveiled for us in the breaking of the bread. Let us hold these things in our hearts as we approach the altar. The Eucharist is one of the best ways for us to prepare ourselves for Jesus’ coming, since it is both a foretaste of that final second coming, and also the very presence of Jesus Himself. The Season of Advent is another important time to help us prepare for His coming, liturgically at Christmas, but also at the end, as we shall see in the Advent readings.

Advent is rapidly approaching, which means that liturgically we are coming to the end, since Advent is our new year. Let us prepare for the new year by really striving to draw closer to Jesus over these last two weeks of this liturgical year.

- Jeff Morrow