As It Was In The Days Of Noah

2 JN 4-9
LK 17:26-37

Where the Body is, there the vultures will be gathered together.” (Lk. 17:37 ; Matthew 24:28).

In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus speaks of “as in the days of Noah” in both Matthew 24:37-39 and Luke 17:26-27. He is talking about the wicked people who, the Flood “destroyed them all” (Luke)/”took them all away” (Matthew). Jesus is saying it will be like this at His coming (twice in both passages). Then in Matthew, He says, “one will be taken… the other left.” His subject was the wicked. The verb was what will happen to them: they died.

Jesus tells his disciples: “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man.”  They were eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage up to the day Noah and his family entered the ark.  It rained for 40 days and 40 nights.  The flood waters destroyed everything on earth.

Jesus also recalls the story of Lot.  In Lot’s time, they also were eating, drinking, buying, and selling.  But on the day Lot and his family left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained down on the town and destroyed everyone and everything.  The demands and distractions of daily life left them unprepared for the “end time.”

This seemingly dark gospel, coming at a dark time of the year, should call us to reflection.  The Church reminds us that the end of the liturgical season draws near.  In less than three weeks, we will enter the new season of Advent.  It is time to get ready, to prepare for this “end time.”

With this gospel, Christ also encourages us to reflect – as in Noah’s and Lot’s times, the end times are always upon us.  Christ urges us to be always ready, always prepared to meet Jesus in those we encounter in our daily lives, in the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes in the darkness of Bethlehem, and, in the “end time,” face-to-face worshiping God in the Kingdom.

Fr Osho