Reflection on the holy Gospel reading for the first Sunday after the Feast of Holy Cross
Old Testament reading: Genesis 42:1-8; Hosea 5:1-5; Isaiah 57:14-20
Holy Gospel reading: St. Mark 13:30-37
The setting of St. Mark chapter 13 begins with Christ on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, while Peter, James, John, and Andrew question Him privately concerning the future. The disciples gaze upon the splendour of Temple and wonder about coming events. At the conclusion of His discourse concerning tribulation, judgement, and the coming of the Son of Man, Christ gives His disciples neither a date to calculate nor a chronology to master but instead redirects them to the deeper task of watchfulness.
The concern of the disciples is when the
Lord will come; His concern is how they will be found when He comes.
Watchfulness is often reduced to a temporal exercise, a strenuous refusal to sleep while counting the hours until an expected arrival. Yet in the Scriptures, watchfulness signifies something far deeper than anxious scrutiny of history or fearful anticipation of the world's end. Holy Scripture does not condemn bodily rest. Sleep itself is a gift of God, and the restoration of the body is part of the Creator's loving provision for His creatures. Rather, Christ warns against a more perilous sleep; the slumber of a soul that has lost its eschatological vision.
It is possible to remain physically awake while becoming spiritually insensible, to continue living within God’s world while no longer expecting God, discerning His presence, or longing for His visitation. The sleeping soul may remain religiously active; it may participate in worship and occupy itself with sacred things. Yet beneath this outward activity, it neither recognises His presence nor His voice. It waits for Him at the end of history while repeatedly passing Him by within history. The deepest danger of spiritual sleep, therefore, is not merely that we cease to see. It is that we cease to see truly.
Genesis 42 provides a haunting Old Testament
icon of this spiritual condition. Famine has driven Jacob's sons to go down to
Egypt for grain, and they stand before the very brother they betrayed, but do
not know him. "Joseph knew his brethren, but they knew him not"
(Genesis 42:8). The poignancy of the scene lies in its terrible nearness.
Joseph is not absent from them. He stands directly before them, sees them,
hears them, and remembers them.
This is the tragedy of unwatchfulness in its
most personal form; to stand in the presence of the one who bears life and salvation
yet remain blind to his identity. Their failure of recognition is not merely
the result of Joseph’s Egyptian appearance. Years of guilt and distance have
dulled the faculty of recognition itself.
Against this failure of recognition stands one of the most luminous moments in the Gospel. When the Virgin Mary enters the house of Elizabeth and offers her greeting, the unborn John leaps within his mother’s womb, and Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. Joseph’s grown brothers stand before their deliverer and fail to recognise him; John, still hidden in the darkness of the womb, perceives the approach of his Lord and responds with joy. Those who possessed bodily sight remained spiritually blind, while the child, who is yet to behold the light of the day, recognised the Light of the world. The infant’s leap was the response of a life already made attentive by grace.
Watchfulness begins precisely here. It is the
purification of perception by which the soul becomes capable of recognising
Christ beneath the veils through which He chooses to approach us. The Lord who shall come in
glory is also the Lord who comes quietly within history. He comes clothed in
the distress of a neighbour, in the interruption of a stranger, in the silence
of prayer, in the demands of mercy, and in the unspectacular duties of ordinary
faithfulness.
The spiritually sleeping heart asks, “When will
the Lord come?” even while the Lord stands unrecognised at its door. The great
danger is not simply that Christ may come and find us physically asleep. It is
that He may come as Joseph stood before his brothers, present but unknown, near
but unrecognised, bearing the bread of life while we perceive only a stranger.
St. Mark himself gives us a beautiful
embodiment of such watchfulness immediately after the conclusion of the discourse
on Mount Olives with the story of the woman with the alabaster jar (St. Mark
14:3–9). In Bethany, an unnamed woman enters the house carrying an alabaster
vessel of precious ointment. The disciples have heard Christ speak repeatedly
of His suffering and death, yet they remain unable to comprehend. While the
Twelve remain preoccupied with timetables and status, she alone perceives the sacred
urgency. She cannot explain every event that is about to unfold. Yet she
discerns the moment and responds to it with extravagant love by pouring the
ointment upon the head of Christ. She
watches because she loves, and because she loves, she sees.
The second Old Testament reading from Hosea 5 exposes the interior corruption by
which spiritual vision is lost. The prophet addresses a people whose
estrangement from God has become so deeply rooted that it now governs their
very capacity to perceive. Hosea declares- “The pride of Israel testifies to
his face” (v.5). Pride is both evidence and blindness. It exposes the
soul’s estrangement from God while simultaneously preventing that soul from
perceiving the truth about itself. Pride encloses the person within the narrow
world of the self. The soul curves inward until it can no longer behold
anything beyond its own reflection.
This is why the proud heart cannot watch.
Watchfulness requires an openness to the unexpected movements of God, but pride
has already decided where God may appear, how He must act, and through whom He
is permitted to speak. When He comes in a form that unsettles our expectations,
pride dismisses Him. When He speaks through a person we consider insignificant,
pride refuses to listen. When He approaches through repentance, correction, or
costly obedience, pride turns away. Hosea’s warning is consequently severe-we
may possess sight and yet remain blind, hear the words of God and yet resist
His voice, stand within the precincts of religion and yet fail to know the
Lord.
Where Hosea unveils the blindness produced by pride, Isaiah 57 reveals the healing of vision through humility and contrition. Humility is not self-contempt, nor is contrition a denial of human dignity. Humility is the restoration of truth within the soul. It is the blessed release of making the self the centre of all things. The humble heart sees clearly because it no longer demands that reality conform to its own desires. It becomes receptive, spacious, and capable of wonder.
Humility awakens the soul to the God who has already drawn near. And the purpose of this nearness is healing: “I have seen his ways, and will heal him” (Isaiah 57:18). The contrite are not healed because they have attained spiritual perfection. They are healed because they have ceased to hide their wounds from the Physician. Humility is the point at which the soul stops defending its sickness and consents to be healed.
This is the watchfulness to which Christ
summons us. It is not the mastery of dates but the daily schooling of the heart
in humility, mercy, repentance, and love, so that the features of Christ may
become familiar to us even beneath the disguises of ordinary life.
The watchful heart is not a tense heart,
perpetually afraid of being caught unprepared. It is a wounded but open heart,
waiting for the One who comes not merely to inspect but to restore. It does not
watch in terror, as though the Master’s return were a threat. It watches with
longing because it has learned that the One who comes is the Physician, the
Bridegroom, the rejected Brother bearing bread, and the Lord worthy of every
drop of precious ointment.
The tragedy would not be that the Lord came at
an hour we had failed to predict. It would be that He came in mercy, in
suffering, in sacrament, in neighbour, in stranger, and in the secret
visitations of grace, yet found us unable to recognise Him. The decisive
question is whether we have loved Him deeply enough to know Him when He comes.
In Christ,
Rincy
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