Thursday, November 10, 201632nd Week in
Ordinary Time First Reading: Wis 7: 22- 8:1
Gospel Reading:
Lk 17:20-25
The Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was to come. He answered, “The kingdom of God is not like something you can observe and say of it: ‘Look, here it is! There it is!’ See, the kingdom of God is among you.”
And Jesus said to his disciples, “The time is at hand when you will long to see one of the glorious days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. Then people will tell you: ‘Look there! Look here!’ Do not go, do not follow them. As lightning flashes from one end of the sky to the other, so will it be with the Son of Man. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this people.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
A priest walked into a pub and said to the first man he met, “Do you want to go to heaven?” The man said, “I do Father.” The priest ticked a checklist and went to another guy. “Do you want to go to heaven?” he asked. “Certainly, Father,” was the man’s reply. The priest worked on his checklist again and walked up to a lanky guy. He asked, “Do you want to go to heaven?” The guy said, “No, I don’t Father.” The priest said, “I don’t believe this. You mean to tell me that when you die you don’t want to go to heaven?” The lanky guy explained, “Oh, when I die, yes. I thought you are enlisting people to go right now. (Adapted from www.ahajokes.com).
When Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is among you” he didn’t mean to peg human destiny to this finite world. Heaven is still essentially God’s kingdom in the afterlife. But it begins here and now. Earth is one school where we learn the language of heaven – the language of love and other Godly virtues. If we fail to learn these languages, we will be strangers in God’s paradise. Heaven will be hell for the unprepared.
Living this lifetime as a preparation for heaven is like sending construction materials ahead of us to heaven so that we won’t be homeless in God’s paradise. These construction materials take the form of merits derived from acts done out of love. The highest merit-generating act of love is giving. There is a lot of practical wisdom in giving, by the way. Accumulating material things can be toxic much as the stagnant water we keep in our water tanks become toxic when held stagnant for quite a time.
If one were to approach us and ask if we would like to go to heaven there is a big chance we’d answer “yes but not now”. Hopefully this answer is not a reflection of how attached we are to this world but of how solicitous we are in doing more good on earth. -(Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM., MAPM., MMExM., REB., Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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