Similarly, as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building; on the day when Lot left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all.
So it will be on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, someone who is on the housetop and whose belongings are in the house must not go down to get them, and likewise one in the field must not return to what was left behind.
Remember the wife of Lot. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it. I tell you, on that night there will be two people in one bed; one will be taken, the other left. And there will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken, the other left.”
They said to him in reply, “Where, Lord?” He said to them, “Where the body is, there also the vultures will gather.” (Luke 17:26-37)
If Lot is among us, then please let’s not let him leave our cities. It didn’t go very well for Sodom. If we see Noah, let’s help him build that ark needed for us to survive the flood that is coming. However, it may too late for us standing on our housetops and in the fields. This reading from Luke certainly focuses on the end-times. Jesus warns us about the gathering vultures readying themselves to feast on our bodies. What in the world is going on?!
Apparently, these passages are about the second coming of Jesus. According to minister William Barclay in his 1975 book “The Gospel of Luke:” “When that day comes [second coming] the judgements of God will operate, and of two people, who all their lives lived side-by-side, one will be taken and the other left. There is a warning here. Intimacy with a good person does not necessarily guarantee our own salvation. ‘No man can deliver his brother.’ Is it not often true that a family is apt to leave the duties of church membership to one of its number? Is it not often true that a husband leaves the duties of the church to his wife? The judgement of God is an individual judgement. We cannot discharge our duty to God by proxy not even by association. Often one will be taken and another left.”
Wow! I hope I’m not the one left behind. I suspect my wife will be “taken up.” I’ve long thought she has the bigger heart and the greater faith. I’m a deacon, but that doesn’t give me any special privileges or a leg up on my fate as compared to my wife’s. Are the vultures going to gather and feast on my body? Yum.
Then again, what about the second coming of Christ? Here’s a refresher provided by “Catholic Answers:” “The Advent season only reinforces what Catholics already repeatedly confess during every celebration of the Mass. ‘Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.’ The congregation proclaims, while the Lord’s Prayer pleads, ‘Thy kingdom come,’ and the Nicene Creed promises that Christ ‘will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’ and has the faithful look forward to the ‘life of the world to come.’
Even if many Mass-goers don’t think much about the meaning of these words, the expectant hope for Christ’s Second Coming and for the ultimate redemption and transformation of the world-what theologians call eschatology, the ‘talk about the last things’ – is at the core of the Good News Christians proclaim.
According to Irish Jesuit theologian Father Dermot Lane, president of the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin, such Christian talk about the last things ‘is ultimately about hope seeking understanding.’
And the object of Christian hope, explains Lane, the author of 'Keeping Hope Alive: Stirrings in Christian Theology' is: ‘Christ crucified and risen. In the light of the death and Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the Christian is one who dares to hope for the triumph of good over evil, of justice over injustice, and love over hatred in this life and eternity.’”
Father Lane’s explanation is helpful especially about what we dare to hope.
Deacon David Pierce
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