So, here we are … swimming our way through life.
Like big fish in a vast sea that is full of joy and pleasure, food and drink, good things and bad things … underwater vegetation that bears good fruit and underwater vegetation that bears forbidden fruits.
We swim and we make choices and we keep on swimming.
We know that some day that giant net will be cast across the water and it will float down from the surface of the waves to the depths of the ocean … then it will be pulled suddenly and briskly in a direction toward the shore.
God is on the shore.
His angels are manning the nets, pulling us in to an unknown destination, a future existence that we can only imagine. Some of us will be placed in a bucket to be carried to the feast of heaven. Others will be cast aside.
I can’t help but ponder what it would be like to be cast aside into a rotting pile of fish. My eyes start to glaze over, my lungs sore from trying to take another breath, my heart heavy with sorrow and regret … as the seconds slowly tick by.
Today’s Gospel makes it quite clear that there is truly a good destination – filled with life and love and the Lord – and a bad destination, filled with sorrow and angst and death. This is heaven vs. hell. These are not concepts, but realities for our souls.
You may not believe it. I understand. It is a bit far-fetched.
But as for me and my house, we choose to believe; we choose to work hard to be among the fortunate fish in the bucket of the angels – there by the grace of God, but with the consent and cooperation of our own faith and actions, which we choose to embrace with our free will.
We need God in our lives. We need to thank him for our existence. And we need to embrace everything that He is and everything that He has taught us – from the Old Testament times of Abraham and Moses, to his son, Jesus Christ.
The lesson seems to always be the same. Be wise in your choices. Choose what is good … stay away from what is evil.
Pretty simple stuff, but not so easy to do in a world that seems designed to throw us off track at every opportunity.
We are on a journey.
Like our forefathers in today’s first reading, we watch as Moses prepares a place for God’s presence – an ark of the covenant, where God would lead His chosen people into a promised land.
And like the apostles in the Gospel, listening to Jesus preach one more time before he enters His own journey toward the cross, where he will face judgment, punishment and crucifixion by man – a destination that we all face one way or another.
We know it’s coming.
Sure, we know that in the end, good trumps evil … the way a Jack of hearts trumps an Ace when we play euchre.
But we also know that we are humans and we are far from perfect and that there is no guarantee that we will finish the race on the right side of truth and justice and God’s way of salvation.
So, we pray … we ask for strength and knowledge and wisdom. We trust that the Lord will lead us on the right path, despite our own silly wants and desires.
And we try to please God.
And Thomas Merton, the famous monk, tells us in his prayer, that we may not know if we actually do please God … but we trust that the very fact that we want to please God is, in itself, pleasing to God; and that he will never lead us astray.
So, let us be fish in a bucket.
Let us follow the Ark.
Let us follow the Son on His journey to the cross.
Let us pray that we can overcome the temptations that this world offers and follow the right path toward a salvation that is so much better in the long run. A place where we will live forever.
