The opening line of today’s
first reading, 1 Peter 4: 7-13, is “Beloved: The end of all things is at hand.” Keeping our end in mind, knowing that the day
of our rebirth into eternal life could be any day, would we, I wonder, live
today differently? Believing the end
time was imminent, St. Peter instructs us to “love intensely”, to “be
hospitable to others without complaining,” and to use the gifts we have been
given “to serve one another.”
Wow! What a message for all of us awaiting, if you
will, our end time here on this earth.
We are here for one thing and one thing only, to love intensely, not
half-heartedly or lukewarmly. What
happens to a person on this journey of love and transformation by Love when a
person’s innate ability to love as God loves, to forgive as God forgives, to
make whole as God makes whole, to serve others as God serves us, when a person has been taught that life is solely
about filling it with material things,
about never saying “no” to oneself, about using sex as an experiment, a thing
of pleasure and instant gratification with no commitment or responsibility,
with little or no love for self or others. What if one has been taught to
perceive life from purely a narcissistic, consumeristic, materialistic,
pragmatic, scientific end and only for personal aggrandizement and
glorification of the self with the
deeper purposes of existence being ignored, avoided and untaught.
Seeing us
misunderstanding and abusing the end for which we have been put here on this
earth—to love as God loves—would Jesus not do for us what He did when, in today’s
Gospel, He saw how the Temple was converted
into a “den of thieves”? Would he not
teach us the real purpose of life on this earth, its sacredness, its holiness,
as He taught the moneychangers the real purpose of the Temple?
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