Stay Awake and Be Alert
A Reflection on Luke 17:26-37
Jesus told his disciples something pretty startling in Luke 17: when the
Son of Man comes, it'll be like lightning flashing across the sky, sudden,
unmistakable, impossible to miss. People will be going about their normal
lives, eating and drinking, working, shopping, just a typical day. Then boom.
Everything changes in an instant. Two people will be standing right next to
each other, and one will be taken while the other is left behind. It sounds
intense because it is. Jesus isn't trying to scare us; he's trying to wake us
up.
Here's where the rosary comes in, you knew I would make a connection somehow,
and it's actually kind of beautiful. When we pray the rosary, we're doing
something that might seem repetitive or ordinary on the surface. We're holding
beads, praying the same prayers over and over, thinking about moments from
Jesus's life. But what we're really doing is training our hearts to stay awake.
Each mystery, whether it's joyful, luminous, sorrowful, or glorious, it reminds
us that God is always present in our ordinary life. The angel appears to Mary
while she's just living her life. Jesus is born in a stable. He rises on an
ordinary Sunday morning. The rosary teaches us that the sacred, blessed moments
and the everyday events in our lives are always together.
Think about those people in Jesus's story, the ones eating, working, sleeping.
They weren't doing anything wrong. They were just... not paying attention. Just
think of the rosary as our practice for paying attention. When we meditate on
the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, we remember Mary and Joseph frantically
searching for three days. When we pray the Agony in the Garden, we recall Jesus
asking his friends to stay awake with him, and they kept falling asleep. Sound
familiar? We all fall asleep spiritually. The rosary gently nudges us to stay awake,
and be alert, bead by bead, mystery by mystery.
So, when Jesus warns us to be ready because we don't know the day or the hour,
the rosary becomes our training ground for readiness. It's not about living in
fear or constantly looking over our shoulder. It's about staying close to Jesus
and his mother right now, in this ordinary moment, so that whether he comes
like lightning tomorrow or we meet him at the end of our natural lives, we'll
be ready. We'll be the ones who were awake, who stayed close, who held onto
those beads like a lifeline connecting us to heaven. And when that lightning
finally flashes across the sky, we won't be caught off guard, we'll recognize
the One we've been praying with all along.
©2025 James Dacey, Jr., OFS
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