The theme of the readings of the thirty-third Sunday; Malachi 3:19-20; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12; Luke 21:5-19 is on the world and its false securities as passing realities. Our society perhaps better than any contemporary human society do understand well what is meant by a false sense of security, where people may be lulled or deceived into false trustfulness and end up paying by their lives. It is in the same line that these readings are both warning us and reminding us the famous words of Benjamin Franklin:‘Distrust and caution are the parents of security. In the Gospel Jesus reveals to his followers the truth concerning this world and warns them against its false sense of security. This happened when Jesus watched how his disciples were so proud of the temple of Jerusalem adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus saw through this beauty another kind of reality of total destruction: “As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.” Jesus went on to explain to them that behind the beauty they saw, beyond the pride they felt of belonging to all this heritage, something bleak and discomforting was awaiting them: ‘They will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name.’ Today if we have a close observation of these words of Jesus with our own spectacles in our post modern period, we may say that Jesus was proposing to his followers a different kind of ‘world view’ different from theirs in which they admired what surrounded them as well as feeling secure in their environment. Normally, a world view provides a model of the world which guides its adherents. World views act somewhat like eye glasses or contact lenses and they should provide the correct “prescription” for making sense of the world just as wearing the correct prescription for your eyes brings things into focus. And, as an incorrect prescription can be dangerous, so is holding on to an erroneous world view. On the other hand a good world view helps us to meet our essential needs as the need to unify thought and life; the need to define the good life and find hope and meaning in life; the need to guide thought and the need to guide action. It is therefore in the line above that Jesus was warning his followers to watch the kind of world view with which they watched reality. Is it a materialistic point of view, where what is visible is all that matters. The kind of security such a world offers results from the capacity to exploit the world for the enjoyment and the well-being they can provide. It has a utilitarian perspective which builds on materialism, with the goal of attaining self-fulfillment, in a purely material and horizontal way. It is a common secret today that with this kind of approach to the world, man is progressively becoming more and more insecure as well as proving more and more self-centered and egoistic. The point Jesus was making is that this kind of world view and the like may satisfy part of our human needs, but it lacks the most important element of transcendence. And this is what allows us to talk of ultimate security found in the biblical world view, based on Divine revelation and presented by Jesus. According to this view, and as shown in the first reading and in the Gospel, true fulfillment does not come from creature comforts, but from a living relationship with God. True security comes from following God’s will, the commandments to love God and neighbor, doing good and avoiding evil. Goodness will withstand the passing of this world, while evil, and those who do it, will be whisked away. With this kind of teaching, all of us stand warned. We are very often immersed in a materialistic culture, where we are esteemed for what we have rather than what we are. And that is according to Jesus a wrong life insurance. Though our material concerns are very legitimate, our faith assures us that our heart should be centered elsewhere. And if we concentrate on what we are rather than what we possess, this will not only affect our priorities and values in life, but we will be building on rock, which is a solid foundation that will withstand the end of the world. And that is where our ultimate security should be, as goes the saying ‘security is not the absence of danger, but the presence of God, no matter what the danger.’ Ends
