Light your lamps

22 OCTOBER (Lk 12,35-38)

The Christian must always live as if he celebrated the Passover of his life. He must always be ready to leave this land of bondage and misery to embark on the journey towards eternity. On this earth we cannot linger. You cannot live comfortably, as if it were our eternal home. Because you have to leave, but you do not know when; it is urgent that you are always prepared. We are all called to deal with this last trip that will be the decisive journey of our lives. It will lead to paradise, but also to hell; to joy, but also to perdition with no return.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall stand at the head of your calendar; you shall reckon it the first month of the year. Tell the whole community of Israel: On the tenth of this month every one of your families must procure for itself a lamb, one apiece for each household. If a family is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join the nearest household in procuring one and shall share in the lamb in proportion to the number of persons who partake of it. The lamb must be a year-old male and without blemish. You may take it from either the sheep or the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, and then, with the whole assembly of Israel present, it shall be slaughtered during the evening twilight. They shall take some of its blood and apply it to the two doorposts and the lintel of every house in which they partake of the lamb. That same night they shall eat its roasted flesh with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. It shall not be eaten raw or boiled, but roasted whole, with its head and shanks and inner organs. None of it must be kept beyond the next morning; whatever is left over in the morning shall be burned up. “This is how you are to eat it: with your loins girt, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand, you shall eat like those who are in flight. It is the Passover of the Lord. For on this same night I will go through Egypt, striking down every first – born of the land, both man and beast, and executing judgment on all the gods of Egypt-I, the Lord! But the blood will mark the houses where you are. Seeing the blood, I will pass over you; thus, when I strike the land of Egypt, no destructive blow will come upon you. “This day shall be a memorial feast for you, which all your generations shall celebrate with pilgrimage to the Lord, as a perpetual institution. For seven days you must eat unleavened bread. From the very first day you shall have your houses clear of all leaven. Whoever eats leavened bread from the first day to the seventh shall be cut off from Israel (Ex 12,1-15).

If you do not live our earthly existence as a perpetual celebration of our Passover, that is, of the exodus from time towards eternity, we easily fall into the temptation of habit to the things of this world, considering them eternal, rather than transient, fleeting, of a moment, all to be left and abandoned. Nothing we brought, coming out of nowhere onto this earth, nothing will take of things into eternity. Our only luggage will be vices and virtues. With the vices will end up in hell. With the virtues the gates of Paradise will open for us. That is why time is granted us: to eliminate vices, not to cultivate them; to detach ourselves from them, to grow in the virtues every day, adding to them what is still missing. This is an uninterrupted work.

“Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them. And should he come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants.

Jesus always warns us. No one knows when the Lord will come. We cannot even imagine it. There are no probability calculations. They are all wrong, false and deceitful. Immediacy, instantaneity and suddenness are the modes of God. The image used by Jesus is the flash, the lightning. When you see it, it has already happened. It is unpredictable. So it is with of our death. When it comes it has already come. One enjoys an excellent health and the next day he is already at the cemetery. This is the condition of man on earth. There is no safety but in God and in his will. Everything else is vanity, futility and inconsistency. We cannot found ourselves on them. Nothing is sure for us. In the universal uncertainty, only God is our one and only certainty.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints, be a true certainty for us.