Nobody in the days of Noah woke up and thought:
“Today I shall ignore God and be completely unprepared for judgement.”
They had things to do.
Jesus says they were eating, drinking, marrying.
In the days of Lot they were buying, selling, planting, building.
Perfectly ordinary things.
That is what makes today’s Gospel uncomfortable.
The danger was not that everybody was doing obviously wicked things every minute.
The danger was that ordinary life became everything.
There was always another meal.
Another purchase. Another job. Another plan. And then suddenly God arrived.
That can happen to us very easily.
We have Mass. Work. Shopping. Appointments. Messages.
Something needs repairing.
Somebody needs ringing.
And eternal life can quietly become the thing we shall deal with once everything else settles down.
It never does.
Jesus says:
“Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it.”
In other words: do not build your whole life around something you are definitely going to leave behind.
That sounds severe until we remember that Christ is trying to save us from wasting our lives.
And Saint John gives us the other half of the warning.
He speaks about truth and love.
We need both.
Modern culture is very comfortable with love as long as truth does not interfere.
“Be kind.”
“Be accepting.”
“Do not judge.”
All very agreeable.
But Saint John says:
“This is love, that we walk according to his commandments.”
Catholic love is not simply being pleasant.
It wants the good of the other person.
And that means truth matters.
Then Saint John gives an even sharper warning:
“Anyone who goes ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God.”
That is worth hearing in an age which assumes that going ahead must always mean progress.
Sometimes going ahead just means leaving the road.
The Catholic faith is not ours to improve by removing whatever the age finds inconvenient.
Christ has spoken.
The Church receives.
We remain in His teaching.
Not because Catholics are frightened of new ideas.
Because truth does not become false simply because it has become unfashionable.
So the two readings fit together perfectly.
Jesus says:
Do not become so absorbed in this world that you forget the next.
Saint John says:
Do not become so impressed by new ideas that you leave Christ behind.
Both are really saying the same thing:
Stay with Christ.
When ordinary life becomes noisy, stay with Christ.
When the culture changes, stay with Christ.
When obedience costs something, stay with Christ.
When everybody else seems very relaxed about eternity, stay with Christ.
Because one day the buying stops.
The building stops.
The diary is cleared permanently.
And then the only question that matters is not how much we managed to fit into life.
It is whether our life remained in Jesus Christ.
The world is passing.
Christ is not.
So do not drift past Him while getting everything else done.
