August 8 - Friday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

(Dt.4:32-40;   Ps.77:12-16,21;   Mt.16:24-28)

 

“The Son of Man will come with His Father’s glory

accompanied by His angels.”

 

The Lord God came to “take a nation for Himself from the midst of another, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, with His strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors.”  As He came with power to rescue the Israelites from the bonds of Egypt, so He will come at the end of time, and is come now, to save us from this world of sin.  Indeed, the Son of Man shall come fully into His Kingship on the last day and “repay each man according to his conduct.”

How shall we secure a place in His kingdom?  Moses tells the Israelites, in his final address to them before they enter the Promised Land, “You must now know, and fix in your heart, that the Lord is God in the heavens above and on earth below,” and that they “must keep His statutes and commandments.”  Then they will be blessed and prosper.  Jesus tells us in our gospel, “If a man wishes to come after me, he must deny his very self, take up his cross, and begin to follow in my footsteps.”  As it was then, it is now, only the road is more straitened for the goal is more blessed: now it is even unto death we must be obedient to His ways; but now we find not only life on the land, but glory everlasting.

“Among the people you have made known your power,” proclaims our psalm today, and indeed our first reading recounts the “wonders of old” the Lord wrought in the midst of His people: with their eyes they saw His “great fire,” and with their ears they “heard Him speaking out of the fire.”  It is, of course, the presence of Jesus we see before us now and hear speaking in our hearts by the fire of the Holy Spirit.  He makes His power known to us now in a far surpassing way.  And if we wish to know the glory of God burning in our midst and leading us to the eternal kingdom of light, we must be made holy by its power.  “O God, your way is holy,” our psalm states, and if we wish to follow in His way, we must be holy as He.

The Lord is coming with His holy angels.  He shall soon be here in all His glory.  Now He has left us a blessed cross to place upon our shoulders; it is this most wonderful of signs by whose testings we are led in power to the eternal reign of our Savior.  As intimately as you know His humble cross, as closely as you follow His sacrificial path, so well will you know His Father’s glory.