Readings: Zechariah 2.5-9, 14-15a; Jeremiah 31.10-14 ; Luke 9.43b-45
The prophets of the Restoration, after the people return from exile in Babylon, become more and more apocalyptic. What does that mean? It means their understanding of things looks now towards a future fulfilment that would be cosmic, comprehensive and definitive, at a time yet to be revealed. In the exile they had lost everything they had counted on and their return could never be simply back to the way things were before. Too much had changed in their deepest understanding of God and of their place in God's plan.
Through their experience of loss God clearly revealed himself to them as the one and only God of all creation and the one and only Lord of all history. Israel's place in God's plan is in one way relativised, but in another way revealed in its fulness, for the other nations are God's creation also and their destiny is God's concern. The first reading at Mass today is just one of the passages in the Bible which speak of many nations joining themselves to the Lord 'on that day' when 'they shall be his people and he will dwell among them'. In other words the original promise to Abraham is to be fulfilled as the nations also are gathered into the fold of God's people and so brought into the blessings of the covenant - 'I will be your and their God, and you and they will be my people'.
In the gospel reading Jesus, who for Christians inaugurates 'the day of the Lord' foretold by the prophets, warns his disciples of the crisis that will accompany that inauguration, affecting him personally and radically. There is no birth without blood, and that is what is implied in him saying to the disciples that the Son of Man - he himself, and for Israel the one who will inaugurate the cosmic fulfilment - is to be 'handed over to men'. It is to happen in the 'today' of Jesus's earthly life but in a manner no one imagined before it happened.
He had inaugurated his public ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4) telling the people that he had come to proclaim 'the year of the Lord's favour' and he ends his public ministry by being 'handed over to men'. He was not understood at either time though the disciples would later be brought to understand when he explained the scriptures to them, and how everything that happened to him was already foretold.
Christians live in a tension therefore. Our time of salvation is already here, today, for the promise of an eternal kingdom has been fulfilled. But it is not yet fully realised - we are already children of God, Saint John says, but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed. We shall be like him when we see him as he is. In the meantime we are called to continue following him in how we live, ready to take up the cross with him, whatever form it takes in the life of each of us.
No birth without blood. So we look forward to the glory and joy that is promised while paying attention to the warning of Jesus. The glory of God is revealed definitively, comprehensively and cosmically in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. There death is destroyed and eternal life triumphs. When he stretches out his arms on the cross and says 'it is consummated', the gates of the city of Zion are opened for all the nations.
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