"Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience," (Col 3:12)

Mt 24:42-51

Jesus said to his disciples: "Stay awake!For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come."Who, then, is the faithful and prudent servant, whom the master has put in charge of his house hold to distribute to them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so. Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property. But if that wicked servant says to himself, 'My master is long delayed, 'and begins to beat his fellow servants, and eat and drink with drunkards, the servant's master will come on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour and will punish him severely and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth."

There are some things in life that you can plan, arrange even for a longer period of time. Certain practices, such as prayer, reading the Holy Bible, regular confession, can be set and developed with better or worse results. The problem, however, lies in the fidelity to what has been decided, what has been set as a goal in spiritual life. Let's see that in this Gospel, Jesus does not say what exactly we should do in our spiritual life, he does not specify spiritual practices that we should perform in order to receive salvation. He simply says: stay awake, because you do not know when He will call you to Himself. Jesus is not talking here specifically about sin, but about death, about the end of our lives, which will cut everything we have done, but also everything we wanted to do, what we were going to do. May the things we would like to do not include our conversion, our confession, our prayer, because if they are cut off by the end of our lives, they will remain unfulfilled, and therefore will not help us in God's judgment. God will not judge by willingness, by our desires but by the concrete actions that man has taken during his life to translate his conversion and desire for holiness into concrete acts of goodness, love, forgiveness and patience. This is our main task in this world, which Jesus compares to the attitude of a servant whose master entrusted with the task of watching over and feeding other servants. Jesus deliberately used this example to show that just as giving food is a matter of life and death, so not feeding your soul, not sanctifying it, but neglecting it, leads to death, which in the spiritual life is called condemnation. And what is condemnation? Rejection by God for the fact that man did not care about salvation, that he neglected his spiritual development, that he put his desires above the desire of God, whose only desire is the salvation of man. Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Literally: wake up because you cannot see on what day your Lord will come. Maybe we are sensitive to many things in our lives, maybe we see many things, but we are blind to one thing: our death, which is coming, but we do not see it on the horizon of our lives. We can guess it, but we certainly cannot predict it. Such an attitude can lead to sleep of the soul, because if I can't see something, I can think that it's definitely not there, and even if it is, it's somewhere far away, so I don't have to worry. I don't know, so I can't assume it's true. Or maybe today is my last day on this earth? It is impossible to buy goodness and love in a hurry, on the last minute, it is impossible to make up in a few moments what has been neglected for many years of life. Therefore, you need to wake up and it is best not to fall asleep at all, in a spiritual sense of course, I do not advise neglecting physical sleep. But in a spiritual sense, it is better not to sleep at all, because this sleep can lead us not to spiritual rest, but to a spiritual coma, which will turn into an unpleasant eternity for us.

Father Marcin Cwierz, OSPPE

© Milosierni.com 2024

Milosierni13@gmail.com

(+1) 908 476 1477

"Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience," (Col 3:12)