Remember the wife of Lot
14 NOVEMBER (Lk 17,26-37)
There are times in our lives in which salvation comes only from running. Lingering for a moment to contemplate what is happening around us is tantamount to certain death. We are only allowed to save our lives. Everything else will be left, abandoned and forgotten. Lot’s wife stopped to lookonly for a moment and she became a pillar of salt. You cannot even watch. You must just run away, go away.
Then the angels said to Lot: “Who else belongs to you here? Your sons (sons-in-law) and your daughters and all who belong to you in the city – take them away from it! We are about to destroy this place, for the outcry reaching the Lord against those in the city is so great that he has sent us to destroy it.” So Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law, who had contracted marriage with his daughters. “Get up and leave this place,” he told them; “the Lord is about to destroy the city.” But his sons-in-law thought he was joking. As dawn was breaking, the angels urged Lot on, saying, “On your way! Take with you your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away in the punishment of the city.” When he hesitated, the men, by the Lord’s mercy, seized his hand and the hands of his wife and his two daughters and led them to safety outside the city. As soon as they had been brought outside, he was told: “Flee for your life! Don’t look back or stop anywhere on the Plain. Get off to the hills at once, or you will be swept away.” “Oh, no, my lord!” replied Lot. “You have already thought enough of your servant to do me the great kindness of intervening to save my life. But I cannot flee to the hills to keep the disaster from overtaking me, and so I shall die. Look, this town ahead is near enough to escape to. It’s only a small place. Let me flee there – it’s a small place, isn’t it? – that my life may be saved.” “Well, then,” he replied, “I will also grant you the favor you now ask. I will not overthrow the town you speak of. Hurry, escape there! I cannot do anything until you arrive there.” That is why the town is called Zoar. The sun was just rising over the earth as Lot arrived in Zoar; at the same time the Lord rained down sulphurous fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah (from the Lord out of heaven). He overthrew those cities and the whole Plain, together with the inhabitants of the cities and the produce of the soil. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she was turned into a pillar of salt (Gen 19,12-26).
Jesus asks his listeners to fully immerse themselves in this historical truth. Having we to leave, abandon, renounce everything, why do not we first detach our hearts, our minds, our desires and our will? The renunciations made in life in favour of the brothers provide us with a boundless everlasting joy. If we deprive ourselves of things because death or history impose it to us, we lose all merit and our eternity will be very poor, if not even it will be of eternal death. We do not know when we have to detach ourselves from the goods we possess. This separation could happen even right now,today, in this moment. Why then not get rid of everything that one can free himself from so as to be enriched for Heaven? This is the utmost norm, and the most holy, in order to taste well both the earth and Heaven.
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 that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Similarly, as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building; on the day when Lot left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy them all. So it will be on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, a person who is on the housetop and whose belongings are in the house must not go down to get them, and likewise a person in the field must not return to what was left behind. Remember the wife of Lot. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it. I tell you, on that night there will be two people in one bed; one will be taken, the other left. And there will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken, the other left.” They said to him in reply, “Where, Lord?” He said to them, “Where the body is, there also the vultures will gather.”
When these dark days of history are poured upon humanity, who dies, who lives, who stays, who goes? No one knows. In the same place one parts and the other remains. In the same house one stays and the other parts. Every one of us is forced to think that his time is always ready and that is why it is urgent that he lives with supreme freedom towards all things.
Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints give us the greatest freedom.