Saturday of the 11th Week of Luke
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In the Gospel reading for today, our Lord commands us to be vigilant, preparing for the Judgment:
The Lord said to His disciples: Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; And ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately. Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them. And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so,blessed are those servants. And this know, that if the goodman of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and not have suffered his house to be broken through. Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not. – St. Luke 12:32-40
These words ring clear in this present season of Advent, the Nativity Fast, for as we prepare to celebrate the First Advent of God in the Flesh, we recall his great and terrible Second Advent as well, when He shall come to judge the living and the dead. To encourage our practical spiritual efforts, St. Theophan the Recluse relates these words of Christ also to the Advent of the Lord each of us will encounter at the hour of death:
We must be ready at every hour – one does not know when the Lord will come, either for the Last Judgment or to take you from here; for you they are the same. Death decides everything. After death comes the result of your life; whatever you’ve acquired, you’ll have to be satisfied with for all eternity. If you have acquired what is good, your lot will be good; if you have acquired what is evil, then your lot will be evil. This is as true as the fact that you exist. All of this could be decided this moment – here at this very moment, as you read these lines – and then, the end of everything; a seal will be set to your existence, which no one can remove. This is something to think about! But one cannot be sufficiently amazed at how little people think about it. What is this mystery which is wrought upon us? We all know that death will come at any moment, that it is impossible to escape it, but meanwhile almost no one at all thinks about it – and it will come suddenly and seize us. Even then – even when a fatal disease seizes a person, he still does not think that the end has come. Let psychologists resolve this from a scientific aspect; from the moral aspect it is impossible not to see here an incomprehensible self-delusion, alien only to one who is heedful of himself. – Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, pp . 270-271
Incomprehensible self-delusion – that’s it! Where does it come from, and what can we do about it?
Our blindness to death comes from two places – the inside and the outside of us. On the inside, despite the grace of baptism, the power of whose grace we do not activate enough by struggling against sin, our fallen nature denies the reality of death. This blindness is instinctive, unconscious, and we are all born with it. It comes from two sources, one natural and one unnatural. The natural source is the memory of immortality that resides in the human heart since Paradise. We have inherited this psychosomatically from our First Parents, and there is nothing we can do about it. Actually, in itself it is a good thing: It gives empirical proof that man was created for eternal life. Then there is the unnatural and sinful source of the blindness to death: the inherited Ancestral Sin that we are all born with, which carries the damage to the heart caused by our First Parents’ accepting the lie, “You shall be as gods.” I do not think I am going to die, because I think that I am God, that I am the source of my own life. All of my problems come from this.
The external causes of our blindness to death are illusion and distraction.
Because of the material comfort provided by contemporary technological cleverness, we cherish the illusion that suffering and death are abnormal and avoidable. We think it normal to live in an insulated, cosseted environment in which physical problems usually do not rise above the level of discomfort and inconvenience. Even when we do become dangerously ill, we are prone not to ponder soberly on death and God’s judgment, on the shortness of this life and the vanity of all things here below, but rather to cast about frantically for a technological cure, so that we can eke out a few more years of a doomed biological existence devoted obdurately to seeking comfort in illusions.
Because of the frenzied environment created by the demands of work or school, interrupted only by frenzied bouts of distraction from social and entertainment media, we are constantly distracted and agitated. This world seems to be all there is, because it demands our attention at every waking hour. It won’t go away. We are little rats running on a wheel, and we are not allowed to get off, or so it seems.
How do we get off the wheel, calm down, face reality, and prepare for death? The key moment comes when we have a break from our duties, and we make the choice either to distract and entertain ourselves or to do spiritual work: spiritual reading, prayer, preparation for confession, and the various activities of spiritual life. Every one of these moments is a moment of crisis, in the original meaning of the word: not simply an emergency, but an emergency characterized by judgment. It is a moment of judgment – we are being judged at that very moment by the choice that we make. The course of one day usually presents at least one or two such moments that are free of pressing duties: thus the course of a lifetime presents thousands. The final result of the choices we make at these moments is what St. Theophan refers to above: “After death comes the result of your life; whatever you’ve acquired, you’ll have to be satisfied with for all eternity.” Now we know that we can take nothing from this world with us, except our soul. “What we have acquired” is virtue or vice, grace or separation from God, holiness or sinfulness. It is up to us.
Life is short, death is certain, judgment is eternal. Let us wisely use the free moments given us by the All-Merciful God, Who desires our salvation infinitely more than we do, and Who is waiting with invincible love to give us spiritual gifts, so that He may find us watching when He comes.
