Tuesday 23rd of August

In the first reading today we read that the first Christians in Thessalonica were given to speculating about the imminent Second Coming. St Paul has to address their concerns and urges them to stand firm in faith and hope and strength for each day.

Given the state of the world, and in the face of precipitous moral decline, random acts of appalling terrorism, the seeming unsolvable refugee crisis, corruption in public life, moral compromises on all fronts, there is no shortage of doomsayers today.

There has always been the temptation to allow ourselves to be 'caught up' and distracted from duty by idle speculation of all kinds. Usually they lead nowhere and events turn out quite differently anyway from what we had foreseen. How much news time is taken up with journalists interviewing each other with questions like ‘what if', ‘what are the possibilities?' ‘What are the likely scenarios?'

It is important to plan ahead of course but at some point we have to respond to the evils of this generation by doing what our own duty requires, speaking up in the media and being of influence and example too but ultimately we have to leave things to God. We are not in control, but we have free will to make the right decisions. Nothing is set in stone. But we must also avoid the temptation of the first century Christians convinced of Christ’s imminent Second Coming who chose to do nothing - to live in idleness and passivity and as interfering nuisances.

The other temptation that leads us to stray off the point is in the wrong direction is the trivial and issues of lesser importance of we have not the key issues right in upright living, especially conversion and ongoing repentance and ensuring that we are concerned primarily with ‘justice, mercy, good faith’ (Matthew 23:24), and by ridding ourselves of vices of sloth, injustice, intemperance.

We must set about to busy ourselves with cleaning ourselves from the inside out rather than – like the Pharisees – being obsessed with tiny details and minutiae from the outside.

So the two distracting temptations that are quite real and of ongoing concern are idle speculation and superficiality. Both tempt us away from the heart of Christianity – a right relationship with Jesus Christ. We must respond by standing firm to traditional morality in the face of moral corruption and by practising the virtue of hope in the face of despair and seeming meaninglessness.