Friday – 25th Week in Ordinary Time – A

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, peace be with you. I really do hope that you're having a beautiful day today and that you've already realized how blessed you are. Every day, all the beautiful signs that God sends you of His daily affection, and to come to terms with even the difficulties in our lives, because all of it has a place in that journey we call life, and the pilgrimage here on earth which leads us to heaven.

In today's beautiful readings, we delve deep into the peace we ought to possess in our hearts, knowing that there is a time for everything, for everything under the sun.

And there was even a time where the Son of God would come into the world not to condemn us, but so that through His love, through His sacrifice on the Cross, He would ransom us. He would atone for our sins. He would open up the gates of heaven for us, and then descend into the netherworld to announce that the gates have been opened, because the Lamb of God has been slain, and God is now appeased, and shows mercy to a sinful world, but always calls to repentance.

Our Lord, who suffered greatly at the appointed time.

This is what we hear in the first reading, the opening line of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verses 1 to 2: “There is an appointed time for everything, a time to be born and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2).

This is best illustrated in the life of Jesus.

We know for sure that the time of birth was appointed. Saint Paul speaks of how “in the fullness of time,” meaning in the appointed time, the Lord was born of a virgin (Galatians 4:4).

And at the appointed time He would lay down His life.

What did Jesus say about His death? “Nobody takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18).

My brothers and sisters, when we speak of the time of death being appointed, in a Catholic sense, we need to insert a very important qualification.

And that is that God is eternal, and therefore He knows the whole of our life at once: our conception, every free decision we have made and we will make, and the moment and circumstances of our death.

So even our death is never outside God's knowledge or providence.

Psalm 139 expresses something similar, when the author writes, “Your eyes saw me unformed; in your book all are written down. My days were shaped before one came to be” (Psalm 139:16).

In other words, everything is held in God's providence.

Isn't it amazing sometimes all the things that happen to us, that we know are just signs from heaven that God has everything in our lives in the palm of His hands, that He is seeing us through, that He is accompanying us, that He's letting us make our own choices?

Some of those choices have led us into trouble and heartache and pain, but at the same time He's reminding us that if we but turn back to Him, He knows, He sees, He hears, He is with us every day, so that they're not coincidences.

When you hear about a person and then run into them in the street, and you know you have to give them a good word.

When you read something and then you encounter it the very same day, or a word that you never heard that appears twice in the very same day. The odds of that are astoundingly improbable.

So many signs from heaven to remind us that there is an appointed time for everything.

My brothers and sisters, the word appointed is perhaps best understood here as meaning that our earthly existence is finite, and yet it remains within God's providence.

Our earthly existence, because we close our eyes in this life and there's a time for that. But we open them in the next, immediately, instantly. It's like we fall into a sleep, except it's not a sleep, because the soul departs from our body.

And we will see our bodies. Wherever it is we breathe our last breath, we will see what surrounds us, the people that might be there, or whatever the circumstances, because “the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7).

In today's Gospel, Jesus reminds the Apostles and all of us that “the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised” (Luke 9:22).