Thursday of the 34th Week

1 John 1:8-2:6

Brethren, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. 

Mark 13:31-14:2

The Lord said to his disciples, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the cock crows, or in the morning— lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.” It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

The Lord leaves us with the promise of His return, but to know the exact time has not been given to human nature, nor to the angels. When Christ tells us that the Son does not know, we should not imagine that Christ as God is ignorant of His own coming, but that, according to His humanity, He made manifest only that knowledge which was appropriate to human nature, just as we are told that he “increased in wisdom” as a child (Luke 2:52), “because God the Word gradually manifested His wisdom proportionably to the age which the body had attained” (Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke).

As Solomon says, “Do not withhold to do good to the needy, when your hand can help. Do not say, ‘Go, come back, and tomorrow I will give,’ for you do now know what the next day will bring”(Prov. 3:28-29). If we were to know the moment at which Christ would return or, more relevant to most of us, the moment at which we would die, we would live as we pleased, enslaved to the passions, with the intention to repent and mend our ways just before the end. Indeed, in the early Church the practice of death-bed baptism was a great problem against which the Fathers fought tirelessly. People thought they could live a life of sin, and then have it all washed away just before the moment of death. To paraphrase the famous verse from Isaiah, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall repent” (cf. 22:13).

What this shows is a complete misunderstanding of what the Christian life entails, and what Christ wants from us. Salvation is not a reward for good behaviour. God will not judge our life and, if we passed the test, put us on a cloud where we can play eternity away on a harp while those who failed will be thrown into a torture chamber where they’ll be tormented by sadistic demons. This is the stuff of childish cartoons. Salvation is our relationship with Christ, our union with Him, the transformation of our hearts to the realisation of God’s image and likeness within us, and it starts here and now. The Lord will certainly accept those come at the eleventh hour and reward them as he did with those who came at the first (Matt. 20), but we should not confuse His mercy and patience with a desire for us to delay. St. Paul tells us that it is “the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” that we ”rejoice always, pray without ceasing and give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5:16-18).

We were created to be loved by God, and our salvation consists in the reciprocation of that love so far as our human nature allows. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. Sin is a reality, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and we should take courage in the fact that if we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That God waits with open arms to any sinner that repents is such an important part of the Christian life that the Church considers confession one of the holy Mysteries. Through the Mystery of Confession, we are reconciled to God and to one another, and we are brought back into the Communion from which we had cut ourselves off through sin. What today’s readings stress is that, once we fall, our repentance must be immediate. We should not delay, because we know neither the time nor the hour, and tomorrow might never come.