This past weekend, Ruthie and I, and our family were up in Two Harbors for a family get together. Ruthie and I went to the 4:30 pm Mass at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Two Harbors, having the wonderful pleasure of actually worshiping in the same pew together. Initially, when I read the gospel earlier in the week I remembered an Ollie and Lena joke that I won’t repeat here. As the priest was homilizing on the gospel this was the reflection that came to my mind.
When the comedian, Woody Allen, was doing stand-up, he had an observation about death that I still enjoy to this day. He remarked, “I am not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
As our gospel readings wind down to the end of the liturgical year, we begin to reflect on death and our life’s journey. Each liturgical year, we accompany the paschal mystery of Jesus, his life, his death and his resurrection. In doing so, however, we are not merely observers of some historical personage from a long time ago. The flow of the liturgical year and the scriptural readings that accompany that flow are meant to engage us in reflecting on our own life’s journey as we journey with that of Jesus. This merging of our life’s story with his began the moment we were baptized into his passion, death, and resurrection.
The gospel for this weekend calls us to confront our own mortal condition. We are going to die, whether we, like Woody Allen, want to be there or not. We generally avoid thinking about our own demise. Plain and simple it is just too depressing. However, the shortness of our human life is a reality we have to confront.
In Psalm 89, the psalmist writes, “To your (God) eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone, no more than a watch in the night. You sweep us away like a dream, like the grass which springs up in the morning. In the morning it springs up and flowers: by evening it withers and fades.” A little later in the psalm, it is written, “Our life is over like a sigh. Our span is seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly and we are gone. … Make us know the shortness of our life that we may gain wisdom of heart.”
Acknowledging that the time we have on this earth is so short, forces us to think about how we have lived our lives. How have we used the gifts we have been given? In what way has God’s Kingdom been advanced in the world by our presence? Is the world better off for us having lived, or would it have been better had we never had been born? Have we used the time we have had, wisely? Will the lives we have led been deemed worthy to attain to the coming age, where we will become like angels?
All of these questions, and many more, remind us that we are living in the end times, the “eschaton”, when Jesus will return in glory. If this makes us uncomfortable, well then, we should be uncomfortable. Perhaps, we should begin to rectify our lives, to reform our lives. Unlike so many others who run from death in fear, let us embrace death after having had a lifetime of preparation. Let us be good stewards of our short time on earth. Let us be good stewards of the gifts that God has given us, sharing those gifts with others in need. Let us be faithful servants of the God who loved us into creation, and will love us into recreation at our deaths.
