All the opposites will come together some day

Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, begins “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every thing under the heavens. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant. . . .”

There is a certain rhythm to the changeability of things, and we have known this throughout our lives, although there have been many time when we were unable or incapable to accept this. We tend to exalt the positive and degrade the negative; the times that we are happy are so precious to us; the times we are sad we would rather put aside and even forget. The time to be born us very often celebrated with joy and with love, but there are those for who a time to be born is filled with misery and pain, and we ought not forget that, especially in other parts of the world than our own relatively comfortable experience. The time to die can indeed be horrible, as in times of war and violence and terrorism; fortunate are those for whom dying is a beautiful rite of passage, a time of encouraging a loved one to let go, and then praying that his/her soul will be delivered into the hands of a merciful and loving God.

What is most important here, however, is that we become aware in the deepest parts of our minds and spirits that all of this is in the hands of God, and all of it is somehow a part of God’s loving plan. Nothing escapes Him, and to demonstrate this fact most fully, God has arranged for His own Son to pass through but the positive and the negative experiences of life and of death. Was His death a beautiful thing? We can possibly see it that way if we contemplate what was won for us by means of the death, and also to contemplate His death in light of the reality of the Resurrection.

In today’s Gospel (Friday of the 25^th Week in Ordinary Time—Luke 9:18-22), Jesus is exalted by his disciples as one among them, Peter, openly recognizes that he is “The Christ of God.” Jesus insists that they keep this knowledge secret for now, and immediately speaks not of His glory but rather of the Passion He is going to undergo—and His resurrection. We can well imagine that the disciples had a very hard time making sense of this, or as we might say in today’s language, “had a hard time wrapping their minds around it.” Of course they did! It was too much for them to comprehend, this juxtaposition of extreme opposites.

But then look again at the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, which presents one of the central paradoxes of life, again the juxtaposition of opposites: That is the way things are, and the way things have already been, in my life and in yours, and in the times to come. All of it is from God. All of it is somehow appointed by God, and, for a believer, the most beautiful thing is that the time is coming when all of it will be resolved, in our own Resurrections. And on that day what there is in our lives that we cannot make sense of will somehow all be made clear, and we will see God’s hand and God’s love in everything we have experienced.

This is our great hope. This is the great reality of all things. And when it is time, we shall see. We shall see.

God bless you!