“And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man (...) Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot" Luke 17:26 and 28.

The events of life sometimes unfold as if there were a hidden spiritual cycle to which things and people periodically obey! In our meditation today, we are considering three key periods in the history of mankind which have breathtaking and particularly disconcerting similarities.

Noah was chosen by God in his time because he embodied piety amid a generation that had sold its soul to the devil and perverted moral and spiritual values and standards. In those days, the degeneration of positive morals had reached its pinnacle: carelessness towards spiritual things, lack of interest in God and the values that characterize Him had gradually become the norm. Imagine God looking down from heaven and no longer recognizing himself in the work of his hands. This self-denying species had to make way. So, the Lord had recourse to the flood.

Lot, for his part, lived in a Sodom and Gomorrah where humans had ousted God from his creation; they should find his principles far too troublesome and cumbersome for the libertarian life they wish to lead. As the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”. Seeing the extent to which evil had supplanted good and how vice had dethroned virtue, it was clear in God's plan that these two cities would have to disappear, and his option was to use fire. 

What about our times? Is what we see today fundamentally different from the culture of Noah and Lot days? Obviously not: the sacred has lost its superbness to the point where taking another person's life has become as vulgar as killing an animal; social mores are in a state of decay; spiritual values are trampled underfoot, justice is disparaged, injustice magnified. Materialism has reached new heights; the creature has forgotten its accountability to its Creator.  In short, we have everything that characterizes those unique moments that determine the Lord Almighty to act. No wonder we are experiencing the signs that Jesus foretold as precursors of the end. 

What should we do in such a context? Live our Christian faith without compromise and keep ourselves as a clean vessel for the Creator’s use.