Monday, Last week in Ordinary time
November 26, 2018: Revelations 14: 1-5; Luke 21: 1-4.
We have begun the last week of the Ordinary time following the feast of Christ the King, and the Word this week is going to invite us to fasten our seat belts and gear up for the Reign, a call of the special season of Advent! It is like the account closing days of banks, as they say these days. Or like the 'assessment period' in the IT and the Outsourcing fields. The Word invites us to take stock of all that we have been reflecting through these long weeks of the Ordinary Season, before we begin a brand new liturgical season coming Sunday.
John speaks of his vision of paradise: how many faculties he enlists! He saw the vision, he heard the singing, names written on forehead... all of them put together - eyes, ears, mouth, forehead...imagine the head there! And the responsorial reminds us of another pair of faculties: clean hands and pure hearts...hand, heart and head -in short, the entire person is involved in entering into the dwelling place of God.
The Gospel gives us an illustration of a person as such: whose entire self, with all faculties involved in thought, word and deed. The widow whom Jesus compliments is a model of someone who acts in total submission to the Lord, while her hand dropped those two copper coins, her heart and head were in unison - that is, she did, she never regretted, she never went back and mourned for the loss of the little that she had. However small you judge that act to be, she was integral in it: thinking, speaking and doing going so perfectly together - a holistic human person!
If we wish to be part of the 144000 that John visualised in the Reign, we got to be holistic human persons. Thinking what is right, speaking what we think and daring to do what we say and think! In a world where lies abound, falsities fester and showbiz thrives, we are called to build up the kind that begets eternity: the holistic humanity!