The Word invites us to “prepare.” What are we preparing for? How do we prepare? We are preparing the way of the Lord. That means we are preparing for the Lord to come. How are we supposed to prepare for the Lord to come? The Church tells us that there are “three” comings of Christ the Lord. The first coming, in the literal sense of the the words of Isaiah’s prophesy, happened when Jesus Himself came in the flesh. The first coming is the incarnation, where God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, united himself to our human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary and was born a man like us in all things but sin. The second coming has yet to take place. Christ will come in glory at the end of time, when the world will end, and at that coming He will judge everyone according to what they have done. His judgment will be merciful, but it will be terrible. The third coming – even though we don’t hear about it as the “third coming” in the scriptures – is another kind of coming of Christ that the Church teaches. The third coming of Christ happens all the time, but it is invisible whereas the first and second coming are visible. If we learn how to prepare for the first and second comings of Christ, we are preparing ourselves for His frequent invisible visits to our soul.
Thursday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s first reading from the book of Revelation talks about Jesus in a very different way from what we are used to. When we think of Jesus, we think of a man, a teacher, someone who talks to us about God. When we use our faith to think about Jesus, we remember that He isn’t just a regular human being, we open the eyes of our heart to see him with spiritual vision: Jesus is God, He is divine, He is eternal. That isn’t something we know because it is obvious, it is something we know because we use our faith, because we believe. If we believe that Jesus is God, it makes everything He says and does very powerful for us, and it changes how important His words and actions are for us. You can think about how wonderful it is when you have a special family dinner together like at Thanksgiving. Jesus used to have special dinners together with His disciples. Imagine what it would be like to have a special guest at your family dinner, imagine what it would be like to have Jesus at dinner, what it would be like to have God at dinner with your family. Jesus came to show us that God is not far away from our normal lives: Jesus brings God into the everyday lives of the people He created and loves.
Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
The parable of the ten virgins gives us an important teaching about how we live our lives here below, and how we must think about Christ’s coming. Many comparisons could be drawn between ourselves and the virgins, and we are compelled to put ourselves in the parable. We are almost forced us to ask ourselves the question: am I a wise virgin or a foolish virgin? The good news is that if we can still ask ourselves the question, we have not yet fallen asleep and if we find ourselves to be foolish we can seek wisdom. The two readings we have today lead us to consider these two themes in connection with the Gospel parable.