You Know Not the Hour

One

Your Time is Coming and You Won’t Know When Until It’s Here

Jesus repeatedly says that the time for judgment is coming and that we won’t know when it’s coming. This is true for the universe and for every individual human soul. The end of time is coming, and when that will be no one knows. The end of your time is coming and when that will be, no one knows.

Jesus gives a lot of powerful illustrations of this fact but especially in a certain passage in Matthew’s Gospel. Listen to how He puts it, “For as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.

“So it will be too at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. 

“Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”

Our time is coming. It’s coming soon. The time when we’ll face God directly, and have to give an account of everything. We don’t know when that time will be, until it’s already come.

Two

One will be taken, and one will be left

Our Lord gives an unsettling image: two men go to work in the fields, one is taken and one is left. Two women are getting things done at home, one is taken and one is left. But, actually, we should all have enough experience of death by now to know it’s true. 

Two men go to the office. They work side-by-side at their cubicles, at their desks. Then they get in their cars to drive home. One makes it home. The other dies in a car accident. One is taken, and one is left.

Two women, both of them mothers with young children, notice something new and hard in their upper chest area. They both go to the doctor. One is told it’s just a hardened duct, she just needs to nurse through it. The other is told it’s a tumor, and that it’s already metastasized. In fact, it’s everywhere. They’re so sorry, there’s nothing they can do. One is taken, and one is left. 

Two retired friends, still both in great shape, join a seniors’ pickleball league, and one night, after a game of doubles, they go back home, watch the news, and go to bed. In the morning, one wakes up. The other doesn’t, he’s had a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. One is taken and one is left.

We don’t know the day or the hour. We can’t count on advance notice. We have to be ready. The only time you have guaranteed is right now.

Three

One will be saved and one will not

When you look at two people you can’t know which is going to die sooner and which is going to die later. You can’t tell which will be taken and which will be left. But what’s more important, you can’t tell which one is ready to be taken and which one is not. 

If you look at two men working in the office, or two mothers working at home, or two older guys on the pickleball court, you don’t know, you can’t know, the state of their souls. But it may be that one of those men, one of those women, one of those older guys, it may very well be that one of them is ready to meet God and that the other one if he or she dies right now, would become hardened and fixed in an attitude of eternal selfishness, isolation, and misery.

Noah and his family probably looked about the same as everyone else. You wouldn’t know, just looking at him, that he was ready for a flood. You wouldn’t know, just by looking at everyone else, that they were all about to be drowned.

So which are you? Are you ready for the rain to fall? Are you ready if death comes for you before this rosary is over? Because it might. The rain might start falling anytime and the Lord might come for you anytime. So what do you have to do to be ready?

Four

What Does it Take to be Ready?

So what does it take to be ready for Death? What does it take to be ready to meet God?

Well, two things. First of all, you have to have renounced sin. In practice, that means: have you gone to confession lately? And have you renounced everything in your life that is systematically sinful? We all sin. We all sin a lot. But many of us haven’t gotten rid of the things that are systematically sinful, we haven’t gotten rid of the actual apparatus of sin. We haven’t thrown out the contraceptives. Or the pornography. Or the recreational drugs. We haven’t stopped cohabitating with a person we’re not married to. All that stuff has to go. If you’re not willing to get rid of the apparatus of sin, you can’t pretend you’re really renouncing sin.

Then you have to be working, you have to be at least trying to get rid of all the other vices. The anger, and lust, and resentment, and envy, and gossip, and avarice, and gluttony, and the vanity. You’re trying to purify your life of all the situations that make you vulnerable to those temptations. That’s the work of a lifetime, but you have to be at least trying, or how can you claim that you did your best when Christ comes for you?

You have to be trying to do right by the people in your life. Doing right by God, daily prayer, and at least Sunday mass, and thanksgiving and praise. Doing right by the people in your life, showing them you love them, respect them, delight in them. Doing good with the resources at your disposal, that your money and your work is actually going to serve God and His people and the people He’s put you in charge of.

This is what needs to happen, and we should all be working on it now. Because we don’t know how much more sand is in the hour-glass but we do know there’s less and less every minute.

Five

If you’re ready to go, you can enjoy being here

None of us know how much time we have left. But if we’re ready to go whenever the call comes, we can enjoy what time we’ve got. People who aren’t ready for their flight, who aren’t sure if their tickets or their IDs are in order, those people don’t get to enjoy the terminal. They’re panicked and rushing and wishing they hadn’t left everything till the last minute. But people who have everything in order, who have planned their trip carefully, and have what they need and reach the airport with plenty of time to spare. Then it doesn’t matter whether the flight leaves early or late. They can browse the shops, grab a coffee or a bite to eat, and maybe enjoy a little leisure reading while they wait for the announcement about when, exactly, the plane will board.

We can live like that too. If we’re ready – if we’re habitually getting ready – to go to the next life, then we can enjoy this one in peace. If we remember that we’re going to die, we can also enjoy the fact that we aren’t dead yet. Then we get the best of this world, as we wait for the world to come in God’s good time.