Gird your loins and light your lamps

23 OCTOBER (Lk 12,35-38)

None of us knows when the Lord comes. Day and time have been hidden from our eyes and also our intelligence. When one thinks that everything is OK, it is then that he must be vigilant, because death could come at any moment. Nothing is more certain than death. However, this is always without notice. It comes, reaps, gathers, and carries with it.

Jesus asks us to be ready, with our clothes tight at the hips and the lamps lit. This way of watching, of being careful, of being ready in some way is drawn from the story of the Exodus on the night of Passover. Everything that night had to be done quickly. The Lord would have come for sure. But nobody knew the exact, precise time. Every moment was good and they had to be ready to leave the land of their bondage. The mystery is the essence of God, and it must be the essence of man.

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” (Ex 12,1-14).

It is truth. We must leave this earth. We must give up our bodies. We have to detach from all that belongs to the visible world. Even with our dearest affects we must part. What does it mean then getting ready, being ready, staying with the lit lamp? It means living on earth as if this did not belong to us. We have to relate with the earth with great detachment. It cannot be a trap for us that takes hold of our spirit and soul and keeps them anchored to itself.

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.

How can one be free from people and things? The way that Lord Jesus reveals us is simple: by living only and all his word. Never might one who lives his word be attached to things or people. Life according to the Word is the true gymnasium of the Christian freedom. It forces us every day to get out of ourselves and to enter the world of God, which is charity, faith, listening, obedience, mercy, compassion towards all. Who lives the Word necessarily flees from all selfishness, and will dive into a universal charity, which is the indispensable foundation for acquiring the true Christian freedom. All this requires a considerable daily exercise, since every day we are tempted to shut ourselves up into our quirks of sin and vice.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels, and Saints teach us true freedom.