A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. Jesus said to the multitude, the whole crowd, when you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, a shower is coming, and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, there will be scorching heat, and it happens. You hypocrites, you know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? How to interpret the present time?
And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? As you go with your accuser before the magistrate, make an effort to settle with him on the way, lest he drag you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer put you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out till you have paid the very last copper. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen. There is a phrase in today's reading from Saint Luke where our Lord asked the multitude, not the chosen few, the apostles or the disciples, but the whole crowd of people. He says, why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And then if you go back, because I was disturbed when I heard that first reading this morning, to the first reading proper to today, where Saint Paul, who's a prisoner remember, Although he's he wasn't such a arduous kind of imprisonment, but he was a Roman prisoner in Rome. And he says, he prays, I, a prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.
Now I want to put those two things together. It does take a genius to do that. But it takes a saint to put them together in reality in daily life. You see, one of the difficulties with us is we do we try to escape the present. We can do that in all kinds of ways.
I wager that if you took a vote, in any case, get on a bus or wherever you have a number of people and say, Is there something you'd rather be doing than what you're doing at this moment? You would get an overwhelming majority who would say, There sure is. There are a million things I'd rather be doing than than what I'm doing. Think about yourself. How often do you rejoice and are you glad in actually what you're doing at this particular moment sitting in that pew?
And yet you notice how our Lord is stresses this. Now I know this is a little figurative interpretation I'm giving, but the point is Christ does say, why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And he's talking to the multitude, to us, to the common, the hoi polloi. And then Paul says, I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. Perfect past tense.
That is the calling in which you actually are today, in 10/24/1980. Not '70 '9, not 81. It this now of course, this idea can easily be bent. But remember, when you bend something you're just you're destroying its shape. You're ruining it to a certain extent, more or less.
This concept can easily be turned into an attitude of passivity, and a monicoddle acceptance. That's not what Christ ever proposed, and there's nothing in St. Paul which encourages us to be manticaros, milquetoasts. Far from it. Far from it.
There's nothing wrong with ambition, meaning to get what what you don't have because it's desirable. Nothing wrong with it. It's just a question of priorities and what these things do to me in the present tense, in the present tense. If my ambitions, if my hopes for the future, and they may be perfectly legitimate hopes, the mother and the father with a little baby in their arms already is hoping that that child will be a better person than they are, will have greater opportunities than they have. Almost from the time the baby is conceived they have these ideas.
What college will he or she go to? And they don't even yet have a baby in their arms. And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. This is a normal thing. Look at the mother of the Zebedes.
What does she do? She came to Christ said, look, Lord, when you get into your kingdom, give my sons good jobs. So there is and there's nothing intrinsically wrong in this. But you see, if if you if a mother or a father, to use just that example, is so concerned about what is going to happen to their child, and is working so hard to ensure a future, which at best is problematic and dubious, that they overlook the present, they have lost something irretrievable, irretrievable. Nobody can go back and relive their life.
So there's a great deal of plain worldly wisdom in our Lord's statement, that that you that you know how to interpret the present. You put that again with Saint Paul. Saint Paul says, I beg you to be worthy of the calling. Now notice the word in Latin for calling is vocatio, which becomes vocation in English. So Paul is begging the Ephesians, begging them that they will be worthy of the calling to which they are called, present tense.
In other words, he's telling them, look, you you have a life to lead. You have your duties. You have your obligations. You have your responsibilities as a Christian. Well, pray God that you can be that you will be found worthy of it, present tense.
Present tense. Now, there can be a great number of ways of going into what we call a spiritual life, but I don't know any any way that is so inescapable, inescapable, and simple in theory as this. It comes back to the idea of the work of the Lord, opus dei, opus dei, the work of the Lord. And that is present tense. And so instead of being so well, there are many words that come to my mind, dissatisfied with the present.
In a hurry to get it over, to get this to get that to get at something else, to have what is at present pass quickly and as innocuously as possible so that then we can do something else. This is this is the tragedy of some people's lives because you see they're leading an unreal world, an unreal existence because the future is not real. I don't care how you get into it, it's not real. It's something you anticipate and project by your imagination. Any and it's there's no more credit to a person for living in the future than living in the past.
After all, I've always said, you you can be confident about history, but you can't be confident at all about the future in the same way. And so I would urge you to look at your lives as they are, not as you would like them to be or that they might be tomorrow or next week or next year, just as they are today, Friday, October 24, and ask God to help you to interpret your vocation as it is. And notice, Paul says, you've got to pray about it that you'll be worthy of that calling. In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.