33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

November 15, 2009

Dn 12,1-3
Heb 10,11-14.18
Mk 13,24-32

There is a popular wise saying that cautions us to remember our bad times when we are high and our happy times when we are low. The Chinese have their yin and yang, the lights and shadows, and we normally think in terms of opposites – plus and minus, positive and negative, good and bad, right and wrong. Also, life seems to be a process where contradictories give way to each other, so that rain comes after the sun, darkness after the light, death after life. Even our Church liturgy is replete with such opposites: during the happy season of Christmas we are not supposed to lose sight of the sorrow of Lent, and vice versa. Life is not a monochrome. Is it perhaps a rainbow?

In this ordinary time, we see the alternating course of glory and tribulation. One should know how to wait, or else one will not see the “Son of Man coming in the clouds.” The New Testament reference to this vision of the coming of the Son of man deliberately connects us to the Old Testament prophecy, and specifically to prophet Daniel. The present points to the eschatological time, the time when the harvest will be ripe and when the weed shall finally be safely separated from the grain, the goats from the sheep. This is the day of reckoning, the hour when justice shall be made perfect.

That is the lesson of the fig tree: “When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near.” It shall not be all winter; one day, summer will come. This is why we should persist in doing good . “Never get weary of doing what is right,” says Paul to the Galatians and Thessalonians. Even in almost impossible moments, it is wise not to relax our guard. Even if we do not know “the hour” we need to believe ceaselessly that one day it will come, like a thief in the night. And it is good to be ready at all times, so that we will not miss the Lord, the “Son of Man coming in the clouds.”

Bro. Romy Abulad, SVD
Cebu City
(The Word in Other Words)