Today’s Gospel serves as a reminder to us not to wait to run back to the Lord. In the preceding verses, Jesus tells the Pharisees, “behold, the kingdom of God is among you” (Lk 17:21). When we look at the full context of this Gospel, then, we can know that though it seems like Christ is just warning us of how to prepare for when the Day of the Son of Man comes, he is also warning us to assume the day is now. Simply preparing for something is different from knowing it’s in front of you. We can prepare for a test that we have in the future, but having it suddenly sprung upon us is an entirely different experience. We should not just hope that we have time to prepare for the Day of the Son of Man, but rather, we should assume that we do not have time. We should make sure our hearts are in the right place now.
Christ recounts two stories in today’s Gospel: the stories of Noah and Lot. For the world at the time of Noah and Lot respectively, everything was good until it wasn’t. People were eating and drinking merrily until suddenly God’s judgment came. Christ tells us that when the Lord’s Day comes for us, we should not go back to get our belongings (v. 31). Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it (v. 33). If the Lord’s Day came upon us and our first thought would be to run and grab our things, that would be a sign of how far we’ve strayed from true trust and surrender to our God. Trusting in material belongings is our own effort to secure our lives, not an effort to surrender them to Christ. If we seek to take our lives into our own hands, we will lose our lives. In our fallen human nature, we simply do not have the ability to save ourselves. Only God can save us, and today Christ reminds us of God’s deep desire for our adherence to his love. He wants us to let him love us; he wants to fully surrender ourselves to him.