Author Archives: Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

This week’s Sunday study takes the seven verses of the week and reads them as the seven hours of the Church’s daily prayer, from the night watch to the last prayer before sleep. It begins with Jesus’ warning in Luke 12:40, You also must be ready, and ends on this All Saints’ Day with John 6:40, I will raise them up on the last day.

A few things surprised me along the way. The verse Agree with God was spoken by Job’s friend Eliphaz, and God rebuked him for the way he used it. The prophets James holds up as models of patience complained bitterly to God, and stayed. And in Luke’s parable, when the master finally comes home and finds his servants awake, he ties on his own belt and serves them at the table.

The line I keep coming back to is this one: we fear the last hour, and waste the others.

It is a long study, meant to be read slowly. Tell us in the comments which hour of your day is hardest to give to God.

RISE & INSPIRE | SUNDAY BIBLE SERIES Category: Wake-up Calls Sunday Series No. 12 — 1 November 2026 · Solemnity of All Saints Scriptures of the week: 26 October – 1 November 2026

If the Last Hour Is Hidden, What Should We Do With the Others?

Seven verses, seven hours of prayer, and the saints who were found ready

Before the First Bell

In the Basque country of south-western France, a few kilometres from the Spanish border, the village of Urrugne keeps a church dedicated to Saint Vincent. Its bell tower rises some forty-five metres, and on its south face, where the sun can reach it, there is a sundial. The dial bears a Latin motto of four words:

Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.

They all wound; the last one kills. The “they” are the hours.

It is a hard sentence, and an honest one. The same motto, and others like it, can be found on old sundials across Europe, because the people who made sundials understood something that we now spend a great deal of money and effort trying to forget. Every hour takes something from us. One of them will take everything. And no shadow on any wall will tell us in advance which hour that will be.

Most of us do not need Latin to learn this. We learn it in a hospital corridor, or from a telephone that rings at an hour when telephones should not ring, or at the funeral of someone who stood beside us at a wedding only a few months before. We learn it more slowly, too, on the morning we notice that our parents have grown old — or that we have.

But a bell tower holds more than a dial. It holds bells. And for centuries, across the Christian world, bells did something a sundial cannot do. The dial measures time. The bell interrupts it. Morning, noon and evening — and in monasteries far more often — the bells called people to stop what they were doing and pray. Saint Benedict, writing his Rule for monks in sixth-century Italy, explained why his communities rose in the dark and laid down their work seven times a day: because one psalm says, “Seven times a day I praise you,” and another, “At midnight I rise to praise you” (Psalm 119:164, 62; Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 16).

The sundial and the bell look at the same truth from opposite sides. The dial says: the last hour is coming, and you cannot know which one it is. The bell says: then give each hour to God as it arrives.

The first verse of this week’s Wake-up Calls stands exactly between them. Jesus said:

“You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” (Luke 12:40)

And the last verse of the week, given to us this morning, answers the fear that the first might raise:

“This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” (John 6:40)

Between those two lie five more: a sentence from the Book of Job, a prayer of the prophet Jeremiah, a word from James about patience, a word from Moses about discipline, and a promise from Sirach about blessing that blossoms in a single hour. They reached us one a day, from Monday to Sunday. Read together, they turn out to describe not seven unrelated ideas but a single day — a whole day, from the darkness before dawn to the last prayer before sleep.

And this is the day to read them. Today is the Solemnity of All Saints, which this year, in the Roman Rite, takes the place of the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time. Tomorrow the Church commemorates All the Faithful Departed. For two days the Church looks steadily at people for whom the last hour has already struck, and asks what made the difference.

So this is the question the week sets before us:

If the last hour is hidden, what should we do with the others?

A Week That Keeps the Hours

This Sunday’s study is built differently from those that came before it. Rather than taking the seven verses in sequence as seven separate lessons, we will let them become seven hours of one day — the day the Church has prayed for nearly two thousand years.

The Church still keeps the bell’s discipline. Its official daily prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Office, is prayed by priests and religious and by a growing number of lay men and women across the world. The Catechism describes it as the way the mystery of Christ, celebrated in the Eucharist, “permeates and transfigures the time of each day” (CCC 1174). Since the Second Vatican Council, which suppressed the old hour of Prime (Sacrosanctum Concilium 89), the full daily round, when every part of it is prayed, has seven moments: the Office of Readings, heir to the ancient night vigil; Morning Prayer; short prayers at the third, sixth and ninth hours of the day; Evening Prayer; and Night Prayer.

Seven hours. Seven verses. And each verse, as we shall see, fits its hour with a surprising aptness — not because anyone arranged it, but because Scripture keeps returning to the same few human moments: watching in the dark, beginning again at dawn, being tested once the day is under way, enduring its heat, growing weary in the afternoon, receiving at evening what the day has yielded, and lying down to sleep.

• The Night Watch (Vigils) — Monday, 26 October — Luke 12:40: be ready.
• Dawn (Lauds) — Tuesday, 27 October — Job 22:21: agree with God.
• The Third Hour (Terce) — Wednesday, 28 October — Jeremiah 17:17: you are my refuge.
• Noon (Sext) — Thursday, 29 October — James 5:10: the patience of the prophets.
• The Ninth Hour (None) — Friday, 30 October — Deuteronomy 8:5: the discipline of a parent.
• Evening (Vespers) — Saturday, 31 October — Sirach 11:22: blessing that blossoms.
• Night Prayer (Compline) — Sunday, 1 November — John 6:40: raised on the last day.

Strictly speaking, the Church’s liturgical day for a Sunday or a solemnity begins on the evening before. This year the Solemnity of All Saints began with Evening Prayer on Saturday night — the very evening on which Sirach’s verse was given to us. For this study, though, we will follow the natural order of a single day, from the night watch to the last prayer before sleep.

One small discovery is worth making before we begin. Three of the Church’s hours are crowned every day by a song taken from the Gospels: the Benedictus at dawn (Luke 1:68–79), the Magnificat at evening (Luke 1:46–55) and the Nunc Dimittis at night (Luke 2:29–32). All three come from the first two chapters of Luke, and they are sung by three people: an elderly priest, a young woman, and a very old man. Luke also wrote Monday’s verse. The evangelist who tells us that the hour is unknown is the same evangelist who gave the Church the songs with which it keeps the hours. We will meet all three singers along the way.

Scripture is quoted from the New Revised Standard Version and its Updated Edition — the translation in which this week’s verses were given — unless another version is named.

I. The Night Watch · Vigils

Monday, 26 October · Luke 12:40

“You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

The oldest Christian prayer of the day was prayed in the dark. Long before there were clocks in church towers, communities of monks and nuns rose in the middle of the night to sing psalms and listen to Scripture while the world slept. The Second Vatican Council kept that night office alive, reshaped as what is now called the Office of Readings; it may be prayed at any hour of the day, though when celebrated in choir it was to keep its character as praise in the night (Sacrosanctum Concilium 89). Why did Christians ever choose to lose sleep for prayer? In large part because Jesus told a story about servants who stayed awake.

A wedding that runs late

Luke sets this saying on the long road to Jerusalem, the journey that begins when Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (9:51) and occupies ten chapters of the Gospel. In chapter 12 a crowd of many thousands has gathered (12:1). A man calls out from among them, asking Jesus to make his brother share an inheritance (12:13). Jesus refuses to arbitrate and instead tells the story of a rich farmer whose harvest is so large that he plans bigger barns and a long, comfortable retirement — until God says to him: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you” (12:20). Then comes the great teaching on anxiety — the ravens, the lilies, the futility of worry — which ends with one of the gentlest sentences in the Gospels: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (12:32).

Only then does Jesus speak of readiness:

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.” (12:35–36)

Several details would have been obvious to Luke’s first readers.

“Be dressed for action” translates a Greek phrase that means, literally, “let your loins be girded.” People in the ancient Mediterranean wore long, loose robes; to work, run or travel, you gathered the skirt up and tucked it into your belt. The image had a famous ancestor. On the night of the first Passover, Israel was told to eat the meal “your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand” (Exodus 12:11), ready to leave Egypt the moment the word came. To be girded was to be ready to move.

Lamps in the ancient world burned olive oil. They had to be trimmed and refilled; a lamp left alone through a long night would go out. To keep one lit was to keep watching.

A wedding banquet was not over in an evening. Village weddings could run for days — Samson’s lasted seven (Judges 14:12) — so servants waiting for a master to come home from one had no way of knowing when he would appear.

And the hour of his arrival might be “the middle of the night, or near dawn” (12:38). Luke’s Greek speaks of the second or third watch. Jewish custom traditionally divided the night into three watches, Roman custom into four; Mark’s Gospel uses the Roman pattern (Mark 13:35). Whichever Luke has in mind, the point is the same: these are the hours when sleep is deepest and watching is hardest.

Then Jesus changes the image, abruptly and unsettlingly, from a returning master to a burglar: “if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into” (12:39). The comparison was remembered. Paul, in what is probably his earliest surviving letter, written around AD 50, tells the Thessalonians that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). And then our verse: “You also must be ready.”

The words to stay with

ἕτοιμοι (hetoimoi), “ready.” The adjective means prepared, at hand, in a state of readiness. It is used of a meal that is ready to be served — “everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet” (Matthew 22:4) — and of people who are ready for what is coming. In Matthew’s parable of the bridesmaids, “those who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet; and the door was shut” (Matthew 25:10). The related verb appears in one of the most consoling promises of the Gospels: “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). There is a quiet symmetry here that is easy to miss. The Lord asks us to be prepared for him because he is already preparing a place for us. Readiness is not a test we sit alone; it is two parties making ready for the same meeting.

ὥρα (hōra), “hour.” Luke uses it three times in this short passage (12:39, 40, 46). Keep it in mind. It will return on Saturday in a very different mood.

οὐ δοκεῖτε (ou dokeite), “you do not expect.” The verb δοκέω (dokeō) means to think, suppose, imagine, or seem. Literally, the Son of Man comes “at an hour you do not think.” This is subtly different from another famous saying, “But about that day or hour no one knows” (Mark 13:32). Mark speaks of what is hidden from everyone. Luke’s phrase points to something closer to home: the hour falls outside our thinking — outside the schedule we have quietly drawn up for our own lives, in which there is always a little more time.

What Jesus does not say

It is worth reading slowly enough to notice what is absent.

Jesus does not say be afraid. Ten verses earlier he has said the opposite, and the whole chapter is addressed to a “little flock” to whom the Father is pleased to give the kingdom.

He does not give a date, a sign or a method for calculating one. Readiness is not achieved by knowing more about the timetable.

He does not describe readiness as religious intensity. When Peter asks whether the parable is meant for the disciples or for everyone (12:41), Jesus answers with a picture of a steward put in charge of a household “to give them their allowance of food at the proper time” — and adds: “Blessed is that slave whom his master will find at work when he arrives” (12:42–43). The servant who is ready is found doing his ordinary job, at the ordinary time.

And the danger Jesus names is not, first of all, a lack of devotion. It is what one does with the delay. The unfaithful servant says to himself, “My master is delayed in coming,” and begins to beat the other servants and to eat and drink and get drunk (12:45). He does not deny that the master will return. He simply assumes that there is plenty of time — and uses it to harm the people in his care.

The master who ties on his own belt

Here is the detail that, more than any other, changes the meaning of this whole passage, and it lies just three verses before our own:

“Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” (12:37)

In the Greek, the verb for “fasten his belt” (περιζώσεται, perizōsetai) is the same verb as the “be dressed for action” of verse 35. The servants were told to gird themselves; now the master girds himself — not to be served, but to serve. He seats his servants at his own table and waits on them.

No master in the ancient world behaved like this. But one did. “For who is greater,” Jesus asks at the Last Supper in Luke’s Gospel, “the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27). And in John’s account of the same night, he “tied a towel around himself” and washed his disciples’ feet (John 13:4–5).

This should reshape how we hear Monday’s verse. The One whose coming we are told to watch for is not a creditor arriving to inspect the accounts. He is the Lord who, when he finds us waiting, ties on an apron.

Notice, too, that this short passage contains three beatitudes: “Blessed are those slaves” (12:37), “blessed are those slaves” (12:38), “Blessed is that slave” (12:43). On All Saints’ Day, when the Gospel at Mass is the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1–12a), it is good to know that Luke has three more — and that all three are beatitudes of readiness.

Your last day, and the world’s

What exactly is the “hour” Jesus speaks of? In its setting, the primary reference is to the coming of the Son of Man at the end of history — the figure of Daniel’s vision who comes “with the clouds of heaven” to receive everlasting dominion (Daniel 7:13–14), and whom Jesus identified with himself. Yet Luke has placed the saying only a few verses after the rich fool, whose “this very night” concerns one man’s death, not the end of the world. Interpreters weigh these two horizons differently, but Luke seems to want both in view.

Saint Augustine made the connection memorably at the beginning of the fifth century. Writing to Hesychius, a bishop who had asked him about the end of the world, and commenting on the servant who says “my master is delayed,” he observed: “In whatever state each person’s own last day finds him, in that state the last day of the world will overtake him; for as each one is on the day he dies, so will he be judged on that day” (Letter 199). The Church holds both truths together. Each of us will meet Christ at death, and the Church speaks of a particular judgment at that moment (CCC 1021–1022); and Christ will come in glory at the end of time for the Last Judgment (CCC 1038–1041). Death, the Catechism says, “puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ” (CCC 1021).

That is why the monks rose at midnight. They did not imagine that Christ was more likely to come at three in the morning. They wanted to become the kind of people who would be awake whenever he came. The night office is a practice, not a prediction — and so is readiness.

II. Dawn · Lauds

Tuesday, 27 October · Job 22:21

“Agree with God, and be at peace; in this way good will come to you.”

Morning Prayer is the Church’s first word to God after the night, prayed as the sun comes up. It is full of light: psalms of praise, the remembrance of the resurrection that happened “very early on the first day of the week” (Mark 16:2), and, as its climax, the song of Zechariah, which ends with the dawn breaking “to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79). Peace, at the start of the day. It is exactly what Tuesday’s verse promises.

But this verse comes with a surprise, and the surprise is the most important thing about it.

A true sentence in the wrong mouth

The words are spoken by Eliphaz the Temanite, the first and apparently the senior of the three friends who come to comfort Job after he has lost his children, his wealth and his health (Job 2:11). For seven days they sit with him in silence — perhaps the wisest thing they do. Then the arguing begins.

The Book of Job is a poem framed by a story. A prose prologue (chapters 1–2) and epilogue (42:7–17) enclose a long poetic dialogue in which Job and his friends speak in turn through three cycles of speeches (chapters 3–27), followed by a poem on wisdom, Job’s final defence, the speeches of a younger man named Elihu, and at last the voice of God from the whirlwind (chapters 38–41). No one knows when the book was written; scholars have proposed dates across several centuries, and the honest answer is that its date and authorship are unknown. Its setting is deliberately timeless and foreign — “the land of Uz” (1:1) — because its question belongs to everyone: why do the innocent suffer?

The friends have a confident answer. God is just; therefore suffering is punishment; therefore Job must have sinned. Their arguments grow harsher with each cycle, and chapter 22 is the third and last speech of Eliphaz. In it he finally says what the others had only implied. He accuses Job of specific crimes: taking pledges from relatives for nothing, stripping the naked of their clothing, refusing water to the weary and bread to the hungry, sending widows away empty-handed and crushing orphans (22:6–9). None of it is true. Job’s own testimony later describes the opposite: he was “eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame,” “a father to the needy” (29:15–16; see the whole of chapters 29 and 31).

It is in the middle of this speech, after the false accusations, that Eliphaz says our verse: Agree with God, and be at peace. What he means is: Stop protesting. Admit that you deserve this. Confess the sins I have just listed. Then God will restore your fortune — and he goes on to promise, quite literally, gold (22:23–25).

And here is the end of the story. When God finally speaks, he turns to Eliphaz and says: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42:7).

So the verse we were given on Tuesday is a true sentence spoken by a man whom God rebuked. That is not a reason to discard it. Scripture does not discard it; Paul even quotes another line of Eliphaz as the word of Scripture (“He catches the wise in their craftiness,” 1 Corinthians 3:19, quoting Job 5:13). But it is a reason to read it with care. A sentence can be true and still be used as a weapon. The question is not only what is said about God but why, and to whom, and at what cost to the person listening.

What “agree” means in Hebrew

The phrase that the NRSV translates “Agree with God” is, in Hebrew, הַסְכֶּן־נָא עִמּוֹ (haskēn-nāʾ ʿimmô), literally “come, be accustomed with him.” The verb סָכַן (sakan) has an interesting range.

In its simplest form it means to be of use, to benefit. Eliphaz used it at the very start of this chapter, in a question that reveals his whole picture of God: “Can a mortal be of use to God? Can even the wisest be of service to him?” (22:2). For Eliphaz, God is self-sufficient and unaffected; nothing Job does can matter to him one way or the other.

In the causative form used in our verse, the standard Hebrew lexicon gives the sense to be used to, to be in the habit of, and so to be in harmony with someone. The clearest example is one of the most charming verses in the Old Testament. When the prophet Balaam beats his donkey, the animal protests: “Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you this way?” (Numbers 22:30). Have I been in the habit — that is our verb, used twice. And in Psalm 139 the same form is used, on most readings, of God’s intimate knowledge of us: “you are acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:3).

That is why translations of Job 22:21 vary so widely. The King James Version has “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace.” The NRSV and RSV have “Agree with God.” The NIV has “Submit to God.” Each catches part of the word: acquaintance, harmony, habit, yielding.

The second verb, וּשְׁלָם (ûšəlām), “and be at peace,” comes from the root that gives us shalom. Its range includes peace, wholeness, completeness — and also repayment, the settling of an account.

Put Eliphaz’s two uses of sakan side by side and his theology becomes clear. A God to whom human beings cannot be of use (22:2) can only be come to terms with (22:21): you settle your account, and the payment follows. It is a transaction. But the deeper sense of the verb — to become accustomed to someone, to know their ways by long familiarity — points somewhere Eliphaz never went. To “agree with God” in that sense is not to sign a confession someone else has drafted. It is to become so familiar with God that you know his ways the way an old servant knows his master’s step on the stairs. That kind of agreement is not a contract. It is a habit of the heart. And it is exactly the readiness Monday’s verse asked for.

How Job agreed with God

Job, in the end, did agree with God — but not on Eliphaz’s terms. He refused to agree with a false account of God, even when it would have been easier. He brought his whole case, angry and bewildered, to God himself.

One of Job’s most famous lines captures the struggle in a curious way. In Job 13:15, the Hebrew text as written says something like “he will kill me; I have no hope”; but an ancient marginal reading, preserved by the scribes alongside the written text, changes one small word so that it reads “in him I will hope.” The King James Version followed the marginal reading — “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” — while the NRSV follows the written text: “See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face.” The tradition kept both. Perhaps that is fitting. Job’s faith lived precisely in the gap between those two readings, between despair and trust — and it lived there to God’s face, not behind his back.

When God finally answers from the whirlwind, he does not explain Job’s suffering. He shows Job the immensity of creation. And Job’s response is not an argument won or lost but an encounter: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (42:5). Hold on to that sentence. The week will end, on Sunday, with a promise to “all who see the Son.”

There is one last irony. Near the end of his speech, Eliphaz had promised Job that if he repented, God “will deliver even those who are guilty; they will escape because of the cleanness of your hands” (22:30, NRSV; the Hebrew is difficult and translations differ). Many readers have noticed how that promise comes true — but not as Eliphaz imagined. At the end of the book, God tells Eliphaz and his friends to go to Job and ask him to pray for them, “for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly” (42:8). The guilty man who was delivered by the clean hands of Job was Eliphaz himself.

The priest who wrote a name

Every morning, the Church answers Eliphaz with a song.

Zechariah was an elderly priest who, while offering incense in the Temple, was told by the angel Gabriel that his wife Elizabeth would bear a son, to be called John. He did not believe it — “How will I know that this is so?” (Luke 1:18) — and was struck mute until the promise was fulfilled. When the child was born, the relatives assumed he would be named after his father. Elizabeth said no; his name was John. They turned to Zechariah, who asked for a writing tablet and wrote: “His name is John.” And “immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God” (1:63–64).

That is what agreeing with God looks like in the Gospel. Not consenting to a friend’s theology, but consenting to God’s word — even when it means disagreeing with family custom, with what everyone in the room expects. Zechariah’s tongue was freed the moment he agreed. And the song that poured out of him, the Benedictus, ends where Job 22:21 begins: “the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (1:78–79). A few verses earlier, a young woman in Nazareth had agreed with God in the simplest words ever spoken: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (1:38).

So the dawn hour teaches us how to hear Tuesday’s verse rightly. Agree with God — yes. But that means becoming accustomed to the real God, whose ways we learn by long familiarity, not settling terms with the God of someone’s tidy explanation. And it will often mean refusing to agree with what is said about God when it is not true.

III. The Third Hour · Terce

Wednesday, 28 October · Jeremiah 17:17

“Do not become a terror to me; you are my refuge in the day of disaster.”

By the third hour of the Roman day — about nine in the morning — the work is under way, and the day has begun to show what kind of day it will be. Christians remembered two things at this hour. It was the hour of Pentecost: “these are not drunk, as you suppose,” Peter told the crowd, “for it is only nine o’clock in the morning” (Acts 2:15). And in Mark’s Gospel it was the hour of the crucifixion: “It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him” (Mark 15:25). The ancient hymn traditionally sung at this hour, Nunc, Sancte, nobis, Spiritus, asks the Holy Spirit to come now and fill the heart. Terce is the prayer of people for whom the day has turned difficult, and who need courage to stay at their post.

No one in the Old Testament needed that courage more than Jeremiah.

A prophet in the gap

Jeremiah was the son of a priestly family from the village of Anathoth, a few kilometres north of Jerusalem. He was called to be a prophet as a young man, in the thirteenth year of King Josiah (Jeremiah 1:1–2), about 627 BC, and he was still prophesying after Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 587. For four decades he told his people what they did not want to hear: that their trust in the Temple, in alliances and in their own cleverness would not save them, and that disaster was coming. For this he was mocked, beaten and put in the stocks (20:2), plotted against by his own townspeople (11:21), and lowered into a muddy cistern to die (38:6).

His book contains something found nowhere else among the prophets with such intensity: a series of raw, personal prayers that scholars call the “confessions” or laments of Jeremiah (11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–18). In them we hear the prophet speaking not to the people on God’s behalf but to God on his own behalf — and some of what he says is startling. “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail” (15:18). “O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed” (20:7). And yet: “there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (20:9).

Wednesday’s verse belongs to the third of these prayers:

“Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved; for you are my praise. See how they say to me, ‘Where is the word of the LORD? Let it come!’ But I have not run away from being a shepherd in your service, nor have I desired the fatal day. You know what came from my lips; it was before your face. Do not become a terror to me; you are my refuge in the day of disaster. Let my persecutors be shamed, but do not let me be shamed; let them be dismayed, but do not let me be dismayed; bring on them the day of disaster; destroy them with double destruction!” (17:14–18)

Look at what the mockers say: “Where is the word of the LORD? Let it come!” Jeremiah had announced a day of disaster, and it had not yet arrived. Every year it failed to come, his credibility sank further. He was living in the gap between a word spoken and a word fulfilled — and being taunted for the delay.

That should sound familiar after Monday. It is the situation of the servants waiting for a master who does not come, and of the unfaithful servant who decides, “My master is delayed.” It is also, almost word for word, the taunt that the Second Letter of Peter puts in the mouths of scoffers who mocked the early Christians: “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). Jeremiah is the patron of everyone who has staked their life on a promise that has not yet come true.

Notice, too, what comes just before this prayer in chapter 17. “Blessed are those who trust in the LORD,” the prophet has written. “They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit” (17:7–8). And then: “O hope of Israel! O LORD! All who forsake you shall be put to shame… for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the LORD” (17:13). Jeremiah’s lament is not prayed in ignorance of these truths. It is prayed by a man who has just written them down, and is now trying, in the heat, to be the tree he described.

Two words that sound alike

Jeremiah 17:17 turns on two Hebrew words that look and sound strikingly alike.

מְחִתָּה (məḥittāh), “terror,” comes from a root, חתת (ḥtt), that means to be shattered, broken down, dismayed. The noun can mean terror, ruin, destruction — the thing that breaks you.

מַחְסֶה (maḥseh), “refuge,” comes from a different root, חסה (ḥsh), to seek shelter. It is one of the great words of the Psalms: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1); “I will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust'” (Psalm 91:2).

The two words are unrelated in origin, but in the verse they almost touch: limḥittāh … maḥsî. Read aloud, the line hangs on the narrow difference between them. The same God, Jeremiah is saying, can be experienced as the thing that breaks me or the place where I hide. Do not be the first. You are the second.

The root of məḥittāh appears twice more in the very next verse — “let them be dismayed (yēḥattû), but do not let me be dismayed (ʾēḥattāh)” (17:18). And it reaches back, perhaps, to the day of his call. When God first sent the young Jeremiah out, he told him: “But you, gird up your loins; stand up and tell them everything that I command you. Do not break down before them, or I will break you before them” (1:17). Break down and break are both this same root. Notice, too, the girded loins — the image of readiness we met on Monday. The prophet who was told at the start, do not be shattered, now prays decades later, do not let me be shattered, and do not become my shattering yourself.

One more phrase deserves attention: בְּיוֹם רָעָה (bəyôm rāʿāh), “in the day of disaster,” literally “in a day of evil.” It appears in verse 17 and again in verse 18, and verse 16 speaks of “the fatal day.” Jeremiah’s prayer is about a day — just as Luke’s saying was about an hour. Neither man knows when it will come. Both are being asked how they will meet it.

Praying the whole sentence

What does this prayer teach us that a more polished prayer could not?

First, that it is possible to experience God as part of the threat. People who have lived through a terrifying diagnosis, the sudden death of a child, a collapse of faith, or long years of unanswered prayer will recognise this. God does not always feel like a refuge. Sometimes the very thought of him adds to the fear. Jeremiah does not pretend otherwise. He names it — do not become a terror to me — and he names it to God.

Second, that naming it is not the end of faith but a form of it. In the same breath Jeremiah says, you are my refuge. He does not wait until he feels safe to say it. He says both halves of the sentence together. The Catechism, describing the prayer of the prophets, puts it with remarkable frankness: “At times their prayer is an argument or a complaint, but it is always an intercession that awaits and prepares for the intervention of the Savior God, the Lord of history” (CCC 2584). An argument or a complaint — and still prayer.

Third, that Scripture records even what it does not commend. Verse 18 asks God to destroy Jeremiah’s persecutors “with double destruction.” The Bible preserves that cry honestly, as it preserves the angriest of the Psalms, but it does not ask us to copy it. Jesus would teach his disciples to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). What Jeremiah does model is where he takes his rage: not into action against his enemies, but into prayer, where God can receive it, judge it and transform it. Paul would later give the principle: “never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God” (Romans 12:19).

And fourth, that this prayer belongs, as Terce reminds us, to the morning of Pentecost and the morning of the cross. Jeremiah was remembered by Christians as a figure of the suffering Christ — the prophet who said, “I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter” (11:19). At the third hour, Jesus too was mocked by people who demanded proof: “save yourself, and come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:30). And at the third hour, weeks later, the Spirit came upon frightened disciples and made them bold. The prayer of Jeremiah — you are my refuge — was answered, in the end, by a refuge that was not a place but a Person.

IV. Noon · Sext

Thursday, 29 October · James 5:10

“As an example of suffering and patience, brothers and sisters, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.”

Noon is the hour of greatest heat. In the Church’s prayer at midday, an ancient hymn — traditionally attributed, though not with certainty, to Saint Ambrose — makes the burning sun a picture of what burns inside us:

Exstingue flammas litium, aufer calorem noxium, confer salutem corporum veramque pacem cordium.

“Quench the flames of strife, take away harmful heat, grant health to our bodies and true peace to our hearts.” At midday, when the work is half done and the end is not yet in sight, tempers flare. The heat is not only in the sky.

The long middle

The Letter of James is attributed by its opening line to “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1), traditionally identified with James “the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19), the leader of the church in Jerusalem (Acts 15:13–21; 21:18). The Jewish historian Josephus records that this James was stoned to death in Jerusalem in AD 62 (Antiquities 20.200). If he wrote the letter, it comes from before that date; many scholars accept this, while others think it was written later in his name. It is addressed “to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (1:1) — Jewish believers in Jesus scattered beyond the land of Israel — and it reads less like a letter than a collection of wisdom, close in spirit to the Sermon on the Mount.

Chapter 5 opens with fierce words to rich landowners: “Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (5:4). Then James turns to the poor who have been wronged, and speaks to them about waiting:

“Be patient, therefore … until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. … do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! As an example of suffering and patience … take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” (5:7–11)

Several threads of this week are tied together in those five verses.

“You also must be patient” (5:8) echoes, in shape, Monday’s “You also must be ready” (Luke 12:40). The waiting is for the same coming of the Lord.

“The Judge is standing at the doors” (5:9) recalls the master in Luke who comes and knocks (Luke 12:36), and anticipates the risen Christ of the Book of Revelation: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking” (Revelation 3:20). The One at the door is both Judge and Friend.

“The prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord” (5:10) points, more than to anyone, to Jeremiah — Wednesday’s prophet, who suffered precisely because he spoke in the Lord’s name.

And “the endurance of Job” (5:11) brings back Tuesday’s book. James did not know our arrangement of verses. But his letter holds the prophet and Job side by side as the two great examples of waiting faith.

The farmer’s image would have been vivid to the first readers. In the land of Israel the “early rain” comes in October and November, softening the ground for sowing; the “late rain” comes in March and April, swelling the grain before harvest (Deuteronomy 11:14). Between them lie months in which nothing can be hurried. The early rains fall, in that land, at exactly this season of the year. Readers in Kerala, who know the southwest monsoon of June and the northeast monsoon of October, will understand the image at once; so will anyone who has ever planted a garden and waited for frost to lift. You cannot make the sky obey your schedule. You can only prepare the ground and stay.

Long-tempered

James uses two words for what the Church usually calls patience, and the difference between them is worth knowing.

The first, in our verse, is μακροθυμία (makrothymia). It is built from makros, “long,” and thymos, “passion” or “temper.” It means, almost literally, being long-tempered — the opposite of short-tempered. It is first of all a quality of how we treat people. That is why, in the middle of this passage about waiting, James suddenly says: “do not grumble against one another” (5:9). Long waiting makes people short with each other. The farmer who cannot hurry the rain takes it out on his family.

The second word, in verse 11, is ὑπομονή (hypomonē), “endurance” — literally remaining under a weight. It is the patience that holds up under circumstances: illness, poverty, persecution, loss. The nineteenth-century scholar Richard Chenevix Trench famously distinguished the two words this way — makrothymia towards persons, hypomonē towards things — and while the distinction is not watertight, it is useful. The prophets needed both: long temper with a people who mocked them, and endurance under what that people did to them.

And there is one more thing about makrothymia that changes everything. Before it is a human virtue, it is a description of God. When God revealed his name to Moses on Sinai, he called himself “merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). The Greek translation of the Old Testament rendered “slow to anger” with the adjective makrothymos. God is long-tempered. Our patience is a borrowed likeness of his.

The word ὑπόδειγμα (hypodeigma), “example,” also repays a moment’s thought. It means a pattern or model to be copied. Jesus uses it on the night before he died, after washing his disciples’ feet: “For I have set you an example (hypodeigma), that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). The prophets are a pattern of suffering patience; Jesus is the pattern of the servant who ties on a towel. Both examples belong to the same picture of readiness.

Patience that argues

Here is something easy to miss. The two examples James chooses — the prophets and Job — are not examples of silent, uncomplaining submission. Jeremiah complained bitterly to God. Job protested so loudly that his friends were scandalised. If James had wanted examples of serene, unruffled calm, he chose badly.

Unless biblical patience means something other than serenity.

What the prophets and Job share is not that they never cried out, but that they never walked away. They argued with God rather than about him. They stayed in the relationship through the delay, through the darkness, through the long noon of waiting. That is what makrothymia and hypomonē look like in Scripture: not the absence of anguish, but the refusal to let anguish end the conversation.

James 5:11 adds a phrase that interpreters read in two ways: “you have seen the purpose (telos) of the Lord.” The word telos means end, goal or outcome. Most modern commentators take it to refer to the outcome God brought about for Job — his restoration at the close of the book. Some early Christian readers heard in it a reference to the Lord’s own end, his death and resurrection. Either way, the point is that the story did not end at noon. “The Lord is compassionate and merciful.”

The noonday demon

The monks of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century gave a name to the special temptation of midday. Psalm 91 speaks of “the destruction that wastes at noonday” (91:6), and the ancient Greek translation of that line reads “the noonday demon.” The monk Evagrius Ponticus took up the phrase, and identified it with what the tradition calls acedia: a restless, listless weariness of spirit. It strikes, he wrote, in the middle of the day, when the sun seems hardly to move and the day feels fifty hours long; the monk keeps looking out of the window, finds his cell intolerable and his brothers irritating, and begins to imagine that he would be holier somewhere else.

We do not need to live in a desert to recognise that. It is the temptation of the long middle — of a marriage in its twentieth year, of a vocation in its third decade, of a career that has stopped being new, of an illness that has stopped being dramatic and become simply daily. It is the hour in which we are most likely to grumble against one another, and most likely to give up quietly while appearing to carry on.

James’s answer to the noonday demon is not excitement but patience: long temper with the people beside us, and endurance under the weight of the day. And his reason is the same as Jesus’ reason on Monday: “the coming of the Lord is near.”

V. The Ninth Hour · None

Friday, 30 October · Deuteronomy 8:5

“Know, then, in your heart that, as a parent disciplines a child, so the LORD your God disciplines you.”

The ninth hour — about three in the afternoon — was an hour of prayer long before Christians kept it. It was the hour of the afternoon offering in the Temple, which is why Peter and John were going up to pray “at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon,” when they met a lame man at the Beautiful Gate (Acts 3:1). For Christians it became, above all, the hour of Jesus’ death: “At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?'” (Mark 15:34). It is also, for most of us, the hour when energy drains away, when the morning’s resolution has worn thin and the evening’s rest is not yet in sight.

Friday’s verse is a verse for the tired middle of the afternoon — and for the long middle of a journey.

A sermon on memory

Deuteronomy presents itself as Moses’ farewell: a series of speeches on the plains of Moab, as Israel waits to cross the Jordan into the land he himself will not enter (1:1–5). Readers who were with us last week will remember the setting, and the scholarly discussion of the book’s origins; what matters here is that chapter 8 is a sermon about memory.

“Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the LORD your God disciplines you.” (8:2–5)

The chapter then looks forward to the good land — “a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates” (8:8) — and warns that prosperity is more dangerous than the desert ever was. “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth'” (8:17). The wilderness taught Israel dependence. The danger of the land would be forgetting it.

Discipline as schooling

The Hebrew verb behind “disciplines” is יָסַר (yāsar), and its noun is מוּסָר (mûsār). Both are common in the Book of Proverbs, where mûsār is usually translated instruction: “Hear, my child, your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s teaching” (Proverbs 1:8). The range runs from teaching, through correction, to chastisement. English discipline covers the same range — and has the same root as disciple, a learner.

The Greek translation of Deuteronomy rendered the verb with παιδεύω (paideuō), from pais, “child.” It means to bring up a child, to educate and train, and also to correct. It gives us words like pedagogy. The Letter to the Ephesians uses the noun when it tells fathers to bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). In the Bible, discipline is first of all education. Correction is part of it, but it is not the whole of it.

And the verb יָדַע (yādaʿ), “to know,” threads through these few verses like a refrain. God tested Israel “to know what was in your heart” (8:2). He fed them with manna that neither they nor their ancestors had known (8:3), “in order to make you know” that one does not live by bread alone (8:3). And now: “Know then in your heart” (8:5). In the wilderness, God came to know Israel’s heart. Now Israel is asked to come to know God’s.

The sandals that did not wear out

Read verse 5 by itself, as a single verse on a screen, and it sounds stern: God disciplines you. Read it where Moses placed it, and something else appears.

Immediately before it stands this sentence: “The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years” (8:4).

The discipline Moses means is a discipline that included hunger and manna, the long road and the sandals that never wore through. Forty years of walking, and no one’s feet swelled. It was a hard school, but it was a school in which the Teacher fed the pupils every morning. The chapter even tells us the purpose in so many words: God fed them with manna “to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good” (8:16). The Greek translation renders “in the end” as “in the last of your days” — a phrase that will echo on Sunday.

Earlier in the book, Moses had put the same truth more tenderly still: “the LORD your God carried you, just as one carries a child, all the way that you traveled until you reached this place” (1:31). The God who disciplines like a parent and the God who carries like a parent are one God. The verse does not set discipline against tenderness. It assumes they come from the same hands.

Your heart, not your neighbour’s

There is a phrase in Deuteronomy 8:5 that guards against a very common misuse of it: “Know then in your heart.” The Hebrew is literally “know with your heart.” It is addressed to Israel about Israel’s own story. And it is retrospective: it comes at the end of a call to remember the long way (8:2). Discipline, in this passage, is something you recognise looking back on your own life, prayerfully, with the help of God’s word.

It is not a tool for explaining other people’s suffering.

We have already met a man who used it that way. In his very first speech, Eliphaz told the grieving Job: “How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty” (Job 5:17). The word he uses for discipline is mûsār — the same family as our verse. It is a true sentence. Proverbs says almost the same (Proverbs 3:11–12), and the Letter to the Hebrews quotes Proverbs with approval. But spoken by Eliphaz, over a man who had just buried his children, it became a cruelty. God’s verdict on that kind of speech is the end of the Book of Job.

So this week’s verses guard each other. Deuteronomy tells us that God does discipline his people as a loving parent forms a child. Job warns us that we have no right to diagnose someone else’s catastrophe as God’s correction. You may, over years, come to see your own wilderness as a school. You may never stand at another person’s graveside and tell them that theirs is one. The Catechism draws a related distinction in its teaching on the Lord’s Prayer, between trials that serve the growth of the inner person and temptations that lead towards sin (CCC 2847); but it never invites us to sort other people’s sufferings into categories on their behalf.

A word for readers whose own parents disciplined harshly. For some, the comparison in this verse is painful, because the discipline they knew as children was not formation but fear. Scripture’s analogy does not run upwards from our worst human experiences to God; it runs downwards from God’s goodness to what parenting should have been. Jesus put it plainly: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). And a psalmist who knew abandonment could still pray: “If my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me up” (Psalm 27:10). If these memories are heavy for you, it is worth speaking to someone you trust — a priest, a counsellor, a wise friend.

Three in the afternoon

Why does this verse belong to the ninth hour? Because the New Testament connects the discipline of God’s children with the hour when the Son of God died.

The Letter to the Hebrews, after its long roll-call of the faithful in chapter 11, begins chapter 12 with words that could stand over today’s solemnity: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…” (12:1). It tells us to look to Jesus, “who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross,” and to consider him “so that you may not grow weary or lose heart” (12:2–3) — the very temptation of the afternoon. Then, quoting Proverbs, it speaks of God’s discipline: “Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children” (12:7). And it ends with a promise that gathers several of this week’s words into one sentence: “Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (12:11).

Hebrews does not call the cross a discipline imposed on Jesus for any fault of his own; he had none. But it places the Son who endured beside the sons and daughters who are being trained, so that we can see where the road leads. Elsewhere the same letter says something astonishing: “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered” (5:8). At the ninth hour, the Son who had quoted Deuteronomy 8:3 in the desert — “One does not live by bread alone” (Luke 4:4) — gave himself as bread. And on Sunday, in John 6, the manna of Deuteronomy 8 will become the Bread of Life.

VI. Evening · Vespers

Saturday, 31 October · Sirach 11:22

“The blessing of the Lord is the reward of the pious, and quickly his blessing flourishes.”

In the early Church, evening prayer began with the lighting of the lamps as darkness fell. A psalm traditionally sung at this hour gives it its spirit: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice” (Psalm 141:2). Evening is the hour of looking back over the day, and of receiving what the day has yielded. In the ancient world it was also, quite literally, payday. The Law required that a hired labourer be paid before the sun went down: “You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset” (Deuteronomy 24:15; compare Leviticus 19:13).

Saturday’s verse is about wages. And it was given to us on the evening of 31 October — All Hallows’ Eve, the vigil of All Saints, when Evening Prayer of the solemnity began.

A book the Church kept

The Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach — called Sirach or Ben Sira, and in older Catholic Bibles Ecclesiasticus — is one of the few books of the Old Testament whose author gives us his name: “Jesus son of Eleazar son of Sirach of Jerusalem” (50:27). He was a scribe and teacher of wisdom, writing in Hebrew in Jerusalem, probably around 190–180 BC. His grandson translated the book into Greek in Egypt, and tells us in a prologue that he arrived there “in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Euergetes” — 132 BC.

The book belongs to the Catholic and Orthodox canons of Scripture; Protestant traditions place it among the Apocrypha. Its Latin name, Ecclesiasticus, is usually explained as “the church book,” reflecting how widely the early Church used it in teaching. For centuries it was known chiefly in Greek, but from 1896 onwards large portions of the Hebrew text were recovered from a storeroom of old manuscripts in a Cairo synagogue (the Cairo Geniza), and further fragments were found at Masada and Qumran. Verse numbers differ slightly in some older Catholic Bibles based on the Latin Vulgate.

Chapter 11 is a set of reflections on reversals of fortune. Kings have ended up sitting on the ground, ben Sira observes, while someone nobody had thought of has worn the crown (11:5). The pace of the chapter then slows around a contrast between two kinds of person. There is the anxious worker who toils, strains and hurries, and only falls further behind (11:11). And there is the slow, needy person on whom the Lord looks kindly, whom he lifts out of his lowly condition and whose head he raises, to the astonishment of many (11:12–13).

Then comes a portrait every reader of Luke will recognise:

“One becomes rich through diligence and self-denial, and the reward allotted to him is this: when he says, ‘I have found rest, and now I shall feast on my goods!’ he does not know how long it will be until he leaves them to others and dies.” (11:18–19)

It is, almost exactly, the rich fool of Luke 12 — the parable told a few verses before Monday’s verse. Commentators have long noticed the resemblance. Two centuries before Jesus, a Jerusalem sage had already sketched the man who thinks he has time.

And then ben Sira gives his counsel:

“Stand by your agreement and attend to it, and grow old in your work. Do not wonder at the works of a sinner, but trust in the Lord and keep at your job; for it is easy in the sight of the Lord to make the poor rich suddenly, in an instant. The blessing of the Lord is the reward of the pious, and quickly his blessing flourishes.” (11:20–22)

The chapter goes on: “it is easy for the Lord on the day of death to reward individuals according to their conduct” (11:26), and — in words that echo an old Greek proverb — “Call no one happy before his death” (11:28).

Two wages

Read verse 22 beside verse 18, and a small but telling detail appears in the Greek. The word translated “reward” in our verse is μισθός (misthos) — the ordinary word for wages, the pay of a hired worker. And it has appeared already, four verses earlier, in the portrait of the self-made man: “the reward allotted to him” (11:18) is, literally, “the portion of his wage (misthos).”

So ben Sira sets two wages side by side.

The wage of the self-made man is a pile of goods and a moment of saying, “I have found rest” — followed by the discovery that he must leave it all to others.

The wage of the devout is “the blessing of the Lord.”

The second wage is not a larger pile. It is a different kind of payment altogether: God’s own favour, God’s own good word over a life. The word for blessing, εὐλογία (eulogia), means literally a good word — the word from which English gets eulogy. And the word for pious, εὐσεβής (eusebēs), describes a person whose life is turned reverently towards God. A few verses earlier ben Sira has said that “the Lord’s gift remains with the devout” (11:17). The wage of the devout is not what God gives. It is that God gives.

Jesus told a parable about evening wages. When the owner of a vineyard settled accounts at the end of the day — “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last'” (Matthew 20:8) — the workers hired at the eleventh hour received the same as those who had worked since dawn. The word for pay is misthos. And when the early workers grumbled — the noonday sin of Thursday — the owner asked: “Or are you envious because I am generous?” (20:15). The evening wage, in the kingdom, is grace.

A swift hour

Now the second half of the verse: “and quickly his blessing flourishes.” The Greek is more vivid than any English translation can easily be: ἐν ὥρᾳ ταχινῇ ἀναθάλλει (en hōra tachinē anathallei) — “in a swift hour he makes [his blessing] blossom.” The United Bible Societies’ handbook on Sirach notes that “in a swift hour” is a distinctive poetic phrase of the Greek translator. The verb ἀναθάλλω (anathallō) is used of a plant springing up, putting out new shoots, blossoming again; Paul uses it when he tells the Philippians that their concern for him has “revived” — blossomed again (Philippians 4:10).

Do you remember the word hōra from Monday? “The Son of Man is coming at an hour (hōra) you do not expect.” Here it is again. For the unprepared, the unknown hour is a thief in the night. For the devout, the unexpected hour is the hour in which God’s blessing suddenly bursts into flower. It is the same unknown hour. What it brings depends on what it finds.

What ben Sira could not yet see

Theological honesty requires one more observation. When ben Sira speaks of the Lord rewarding people “on the day of death,” he probably does not mean what a Christian would mean. Most scholars think that Sirach, like much of the Old Testament before the later prophets and the Maccabean period, had no developed belief in personal resurrection. For him, the reward of the righteous is seen at the close of their earthly life — in its ending, in the children and the good name they leave — and “call no one happy before his death” means that you cannot judge a life until you have seen the whole of it.

The Church does not read his words as though he had already seen Easter. It reads them as a true insight that would later be opened much wider: by Daniel’s vision of those who “sleep in the dust” and “shall awake” (Daniel 12:2), by the Maccabean martyrs, and above all by the One who would say on Sunday, “I will raise them up on the last day.” Ben Sira saw that the end of a life reveals its meaning. He did not yet see that the end of a life would not be its end.

Two saints of the Carmelite tradition — and today is their feast as much as anyone’s — spoke of the evening of life in words the Catechism has made its own. Saint John of the Cross: “At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love” (quoted in CCC 1022). And Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, in her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love: “In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works” (quoted in CCC 2011). Thérèse had understood ben Sira’s second wage. The reward of the devout is not a payment for services rendered. It is the Lord himself. The Catechism puts it simply: “The charity of Christ is the source in us of all our merits before God” (CCC 2011).

The song sung at lamplighting

Every evening, at Vespers, the Church sings the song of a young woman who was the most devout person in Luke’s Gospel:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. … He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things.” (Luke 1:46–48, 52–53)

Place Mary’s song beside Sirach 11 in the Greek, and a remarkable correspondence of vocabulary appears. Ben Sira says that “the eyes of the Lord looked upon (epeblepsan)” the needy one “for good,” and “raised him from his lowliness (tapeinōseōs)” and lifted up his head (11:12–13). Mary sings that God “has looked (epeblepsen) on the lowliness (tapeinōsin) of his servant,” has “lifted up the lowly,” and filled the hungry with good things (Luke 1:48, 52–53). The same verb; the same noun. We need not claim that Luke was quoting Sirach. They shared the language of Israel’s Scriptures, and the conviction that God’s eyes rest on the lowly.

And in Mary, ben Sira’s promise was fulfilled beyond anything he imagined. “Blessed are you among women,” Elizabeth said to her, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Luke 1:42). The blessing of the Lord, in a swift hour, had blossomed.

VII. Night Prayer · Compline

Sunday, 1 November · John 6:40

“This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”

The last prayer of the day is the gentlest. Night Prayer begins with a short examination of conscience. Its responsory takes the words of Psalm 31 that Jesus spoke from the cross at the ninth hour: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit” (Psalm 31:5; Luke 23:46). Its Gospel song is framed by one of the loveliest antiphons in the Church’s prayer: “Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep, that awake, we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in his peace.” And it ends with a blessing that, in English, asks the Lord to grant “a restful night and a peaceful death.” The Latin original is plainer still: noctem quietam et finem perfectum — “a quiet night and a perfect end.”

Every night, then, the Church goes to sleep rehearsing its death. That sounds morbid only until you see how it is done: not in dread, but in the posture of a child who lies down knowing the house is guarded. Saint Benedict counted among the tools of the spiritual life “to keep death daily before one’s eyes” (Rule, chapter 4). Compline does it with a lullaby.

Bread in Capernaum

Sunday’s verse comes from the long sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. The Fourth Gospel is traditionally associated with the disciple “whom Jesus loved” and probably reached its final form late in the first century; its chapters move at a slower, more meditative pace than the other Gospels, and its long discourses unfold a single sign in depth.

The sign in chapter 6 is bread. Near Passover (6:4), by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus feeds five thousand people with five barley loaves and two fish (6:1–14). The crowd wants to seize him and make him king (6:15). The next day they find him across the lake, in the synagogue at Capernaum (6:59), and he tells them bluntly: “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves” (6:26). They bring up the manna — “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness” (6:31) — the very manna of Friday’s chapter in Deuteronomy. And Jesus answers: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (6:35).

Then, immediately before our verse, comes a sequence that is worth reading slowly:

“But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” (6:36–39)

The discourse goes on to speak of eating his flesh and drinking his blood — “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (6:54) — words the Church has always heard as the promise of the Eucharist. Many disciples find this too hard and leave. Jesus asks the Twelve whether they too will go, and Peter answers for every Christian who has ever stayed through a hard saying: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (6:68).

The will we were afraid of

The word that opens our verse is θέλημα (thelēma), “will.” It is a word many people have learned to fear. It was God’s will, someone says at a funeral, and it lands like a sentence pronounced from a distant bench. Thy will be done can be prayed through clenched teeth, as a surrender to something we suspect we will not like.

John 6 tells us what the Father’s will actually is. “That I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.” “That all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life.” “I will raise them up.” And in verse 37 Jesus says, with an emphatic double negative in the Greek (οὐ μὴ ἐκβάλω ἔξω, ou mē ekbalō exō), that he will certainly not drive away anyone who comes to him.

So the will of God, in this passage, is not a hidden decree to be dreaded. It is a rescue plan. It is the same will Jesus announced on Monday, at the top of the chapter on readiness: “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). Paul states it as plainly as anyone: God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).

Here, at last, is what Tuesday’s verse was reaching for. Agree with God, said Eliphaz, and meant: accept my verdict on your guilt. But this is what there is to agree with in God: a Father who wills to lose nothing, and a Son who has come to do that will. To “agree with God” in the deepest sense is to consent to being found.

Seeing is not yet believing

The verse speaks of “all who see the Son and believe in him.” In Greek both verbs are present participles — ὁ θεωρῶν (ho theōrōn) and πιστεύων (pisteuōn): the one who keeps looking at the Son and keeps believing in him. The verb θεωρέω (theōreō) means to look at attentively, to behold, to contemplate; it is related to our word theatre.

But notice the sentence three verses earlier: “you have seen me and yet do not believe” (6:36). The crowd in Capernaum had seen Jesus. Some of them had eaten the bread he multiplied. Seeing was not enough. What the verse promises is not to those who merely look, but to those who look and trust. Faith is seeing that has become surrender.

What do they receive? ζωὴ αἰώνιος (zōē aiōnios), “eternal life” — literally “the life of the age,” the life of the world to come. Readers who were with us last week will remember the Hebrew phrase behind it, ḥayyê ʿôlām, in Daniel 12:2. In John, this life is both a present gift and a future hope. “Whoever believes has eternal life,” Jesus says a few verses later (6:47) — has, already, now. And yet: “I will raise them up on the last day.”

The Greek of that promise ends with an emphatic pronoun — ἀναστήσω αὐτὸν ἐγώ (anastēsō auton egō), “I myself will raise him up.” And the phrase “on the last day” (ἐν τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ, en tē eschatē hēmera) occurs four times in this one discourse (6:39, 40, 44, 54). Martha will use it, in grief, outside her brother’s tomb: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (11:24). Some twentieth-century scholars, notably Rudolf Bultmann, argued that these references to the last day were added by a later editor to a Gospel that originally spoke only of eternal life as a present reality. Many interpreters today see the present and the future as deliberately held together in John, and the Church has always read them so. The Catechism, answering the question when the dead will rise, quotes these very verses: “Definitively ‘at the last day,’ ‘at the end of the world'” (CCC 1001). And it adds that “in a certain way, we have already risen with Christ,” because the Christian life is already a share in his death and resurrection (CCC 1002).

The hour of Monday, the day of Wednesday, the swift hour of Saturday — all of them meet here, in the last day. And the last day, in John, is not a threat. It is the day on which the Son keeps his word: I will raise them up.

An old man ready to sleep

Every night, at Compline, the Church sings the song of a man who saw the Son and believed.

His name was Simeon, and Luke tells us that he was “righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25). It had been revealed to him that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah (2:26). When Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple, Simeon took the child in his arms and said:

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation.” (2:29–30)

The Greek words are worth hearing. “Master” is δέσποτα (despota), the word a slave used for his owner. “Servant” is δοῦλον (doulon), a slave. And “you are dismissing” is ἀπολύεις (apolyeis), a verb used of releasing someone — a slave set free, a soldier discharged, a watchman relieved at the end of his watch. Simeon is the servant of Luke 12, still at his post after a lifetime of waiting, who has seen his master come at last. He can go to sleep now. He has seen, and he has believed. Monday’s verse and Sunday’s verse meet in his arms.

Beside him in the Temple that day was Anna, a prophet, eighty-four years old, who “never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day” (2:37). If James wanted an example of the “suffering and patience” of the prophets, he might have pointed to her: decades of night and day, keeping the hours, until the hour came.

This is who the saints are. Not people who calculated the hour, but people who kept watch — who saw the Son, believed, and spent their hours in that faith until the last one came. The Church honours them today, the canonised and the countless unnamed, proposing them, as the Catechism says, “as models and intercessors” (CCC 828). And the Church sings Simeon’s song every night so that we might learn to go to sleep the way he did.

Midnight, Again: The Tension Beneath the Week

Psalm 119 rises at midnight to praise God, and so the day of prayer comes round again to where it began. Before we draw the threads together, we need to name what this week’s Scriptures are asking us to face.

There are two ways to live with an hour you cannot know.

The first is the way of the sundial. You watch the shadow. Either you fear it — and the fear makes it impossible to live in the hour you are actually in — or, far more often, you quietly assume that the shadow has a long way still to travel. This week has shown us that second figure again and again. The rich farmer saying to his soul, “relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19). Ben Sira’s self-made man: “I have found rest.” The servant who says, “My master is delayed,” and spends the delay mistreating the people in his care. The mockers in Jeremiah’s day: “Where is the word of the LORD?” Israel in the good land, forgetting the desert. None of them denies that the last hour will come. They simply live as though it belongs to someone else.

The second is the way of the bell. You do not try to read the shadow at all. You give each hour to God as it comes — the night watch, the dawn, the hard middle of the morning, the heat of noon, the long afternoon, the evening, the night. The servants with their belts tied and their lamps lit. Zechariah writing a name. Jeremiah staying at his post and telling God the truth. The prophets and Job, staying in the conversation. Simeon and Anna in the Temple, for years, until the day.

So the tension at the heart of this week is not, in the end, between fear and faith. It is sharper and more ordinary than that:

We fear the last hour, and waste the others.

And here is the insight that changes how the whole week reads. Why is the hour unexpected? Why is there a delay at all? Thursday’s word gives the answer. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness,” writes the Second Letter of Peter, “but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The verb is μακροθυμεῖ (makrothymei) — God is being long-tempered. And a few verses later: “regard the patience of our Lord as salvation” (3:15).

The delay is not God’s absence. It is God’s patience. Every hour we are given before the last one is not time in a waiting room; it is mercy extended. The servant who says “my master is delayed” has read the delay exactly backwards. He takes the master’s patience as permission. The saints took it as an invitation.

So this is what the week asks each of us to confront:

Am I treating the hours I have as an extension of God’s mercy — or as a postponement of the person I keep meaning to become?

What the Seven Hours Say Together

Stepping back from the day, seven insights emerge — one, it happens, for each hour.

1. Readiness is a habit, not a forecast. Jesus gives no date; he gives a posture. The monks who rose at midnight did not expect Christ at three in the morning; they were forming themselves into people who would be awake whenever he came. Even the Hebrew verb of Tuesday’s verse leans this way: to “agree with God” is, at its root, to become accustomed to him. The question is not when will he come? but what will he find?

2. The One who comes is the One who serves. The easiest detail to miss in Luke 12 is the master who ties on his belt and waits on his servants at table (12:37). Sunday’s verse says the same in another key: the Father’s will is that the Son “should lose nothing” (John 6:39). Christian readiness grows out of trust, not dread. We watch for the One who has promised not to drive us away.

3. Agreeing with God is not the same as agreeing with a theology about God. Eliphaz spoke true words about God and was rebuked for them, because he used them to crush a suffering man. Job argued with God and was vindicated. Zechariah found his voice when he consented to God’s word against the expectations of everyone in the room. The test of our speech about God is not only whether it is orthodox but whether it is truthful, humble and merciful — and whether it leads people to God’s face or keeps them at a distance from it.

4. Honest lament can be a form of readiness. Jeremiah prayed, “Do not become a terror to me,” and the Catechism calls such prayer “an argument or a complaint” that is still intercession (CCC 2584). James holds up the prophets and Job — two of Scripture’s great complainers — as models of patience. Biblical patience is not the absence of anguish. It is staying in the relationship through the anguish.

5. Patience belongs to God before it belongs to us. Makrothymia — long temper — is first a name of God: “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). It is God’s patience that explains the delay of the last hour (2 Peter 3:9). Our patience with one another is a small reflection of the patience we ourselves are living on.

6. Discipline is discerned in your own story, never pronounced over someone else’s. Deuteronomy says, “know in your heart” — your heart, looking back on your road. Eliphaz said the same truth over Job’s grief and became the book’s warning. You may come to see your own wilderness as God’s school, and notice the sandals that did not wear out. You may not explain another person’s catastrophe.

7. The reward is the Rewarder. Ben Sira set two wages side by side: a pile you must leave to others, and the blessing of the Lord. Jesus paid the eleventh-hour workers a full day’s wage. Thérèse of Lisieux planned to arrive “with empty hands.” The saints did not earn heaven by accumulating merit like savings. They received the Lord himself — and their good works, the Catechism teaches, are themselves his gift (CCC 2008, 2011).

Where interpreters differ. It is worth being honest about the questions this week’s texts leave open. Scholars weigh differently whether Luke 12:40 speaks chiefly of the end of history or also of each person’s death; the Church’s tradition holds both. The Hebrew of Job 22:30 is difficult, and the irony we noted depends on a reading the NRSV adopts but not every translation shares. The exact sense of the verb in Psalm 139:3 is debated. James 5:11’s “purpose of the Lord” may refer to God’s outcome for Job or, as some early readers thought, to Christ’s own end. The dates of Job and of James, and the origins of Deuteronomy, remain matters of discussion. Ben Sira’s view of life after death was almost certainly less developed than the later New Testament hope. And scholars have long debated how John holds together present and future eternal life. None of these debates touches the heart of what the week says: that the hour is hidden, that the One who comes is merciful, and that the hours before it are given to be given back.

Keeping the Hours in an Ordinary Week

You do not need to live in a monastery to keep the hours. You need only to notice that every day already has them.

At work. The servant who is ready is “found at work” (Luke 12:43), distributing food “at the proper time” (12:42). Ben Sira says: “grow old in your work … keep at your job” (Sirach 11:20–21). Readiness at work is rarely heroic. It looks like the report finished honestly, the file closed properly, the client told the truth, the junior colleague treated with patience on a difficult afternoon. For anyone who supervises others — managers, teachers, officials, parents, those who hold office in the Church — Luke’s warning is pointed. The unfaithful steward’s sin was what he did to the people under him while he thought the master was far away (12:45). Authority is stewardship of other people’s hours.

With money. Neither Jesus nor ben Sira condemns saving, planning or providing for one’s family. The rich farmer’s mistake was not building barns; it was saying to his soul “relax” as though the barns were his rest, and failing to be “rich toward God” (Luke 12:19, 21). Pensions and property are ordinary prudence. The question these verses ask is whose wage we are really working for.

In the family. Deuteronomy’s picture of discipline is a parent who teaches and corrects while still feeding the child every morning. That is a demanding standard for anyone raising children or guiding younger relatives: correction that never withdraws provision, firmness that never withdraws love. And James has a word for every household in its long middle years: do not grumble against one another. Long temper at the dinner table may be the most ordinary form of readiness there is.

With our screens. The noonday demon now carries a phone. The restlessness Evagrius described — the sense that the day will never end and that something more interesting must be happening elsewhere — is exactly what endless scrolling feeds on. The Church’s hours are an ancient protest against fragmented time. They divide the day not into notifications but into offerings. You do not have to pray all seven to learn from them. Deciding that the last thing you look at before sleep will be a prayer and not a screen is already a small way of keeping Compline.

In ageing. Ben Sira says, grow old in your work; Luke gives us Simeon and Anna, two very old people who were still watching. In Scripture, old age is not a waiting room. It can be the season in which a whole life finally becomes prayer. And to anyone who feels they came to faith, or to seriousness about faith, too late: the parable of the eleventh-hour workers was told for you. The evening wage is the same.

In grief. Tomorrow, on All Souls’ Day, many families — in Kerala as in much of the Catholic world — will visit the graves of the people they love. Jeremiah gives us permission to bring the whole truth of grief to God, including the part that feels like terror. John 6 gives us the reason we can stand at a grave without despair: “I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.” The Church’s prayer for the dead rests on that promise.

In anxious times. News of war, disaster and uncertainty now reaches us by the hour. Jeremiah lived to see his city destroyed. His prayer did not deny that “the day of disaster” was real. It refused to let disaster have the last word about God: you are my refuge.

An Examination for the End of the Day

Night Prayer begins with an examination of conscience. Let this week’s verses lead one — slowly, honestly and without fear, because the One who examines us is the One who ties on his belt to serve.

At the night watch: What am I assuming I still have time for? Is there a reconciliation, a confession, a conversation with God or with someone I love, that I keep postponing to an hour I have simply assumed I will be given?

At dawn: Whose account of God have I accepted that is not true — that he is distant, or indifferent, or keeping a ledger against me? And what is the real God asking of me that I keep refusing to agree to?

At the third hour: Is there a fear I have never said to God out loud? Have I been praying around my anger instead of bringing it to him?

At noon: Whom am I grumbling against? Where has the long middle of my life — my marriage, my work, my vocation, my illness — made me short-tempered, or quietly ready to give up while appearing to carry on?

At the ninth hour: What wilderness in my own life have I never looked back on with gratitude? And whose suffering have I tried to explain when I should simply have stayed beside them?

At evening: What wage am I actually working for? If the evening of my life came tonight, would I want God to count my works — or would I be glad to come with empty hands?

At night: Do I believe that the will of the Father is to lose nothing — including me?

These are not questions to answer in one sitting. They are questions to carry through the week, one hour at a time.

The Bell and the Sundial

The sundial at Urrugne tells the truth: every hour wounds; the last one kills.

The bell in the same tower tells a larger truth. Every hour can be offered. And for those who belong to Christ, the last one does not kill. It opens a door — and on the other side of the door is a Master who has tied on his belt to serve.

We are not given the last hour. We are given this one.

You cannot choose the hour he comes. You choose, hour by hour, what he will find.

Five Small Hours for the Coming Week

1. Give the day its first sentence. Each morning this week, before you look at your phone, say one line to God. Zechariah’s is enough: “Guide my feet into the way of peace.” Then name one thing you already know God is asking of you that day — the apology, the call, the honest answer — and agree to it before the day can talk you out of it.

2. Keep a noon pause. Set a quiet reminder for midday. When it sounds, stop for one minute. Pray the old hymn’s line — “Quench the flames of strife” — for one person you are tempted to grumble against (James 5:9). Then, for the rest of that day, say nothing about that person behind their back.

3. Look back on one wilderness. On Friday afternoon — at three o’clock, if you can — write down one hard stretch of your own life. Beside it, write one “sandal that did not wear out”: the provision you did not notice at the time. Keep this exercise for your own story only. If someone near you is suffering this week, do not explain it; sit with them.

4. Settle the day’s wages before sunset. Each evening, before supper, pay one debt the day has created — the thank-you you owe, the promise you made, the person you kept waiting. And name, silently, one thing you did that day that only God saw.

5. End with Night Prayer, and remember the dead by name. On at least three nights this week, put the screen away half an hour before sleep and pray Night Prayer from a breviary or a reliable Liturgy of the Hours resource — or simply Simeon’s song (Luke 2:29–32) and the words “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.” Tomorrow, on All Souls’ Day, read John 6:37–40 slowly for someone you have lost, and say their name aloud at the words “I should lose nothing.” If you can, visit their grave.

Questions to Carry Through the Day

1. In Luke 12:35–48, what does the master do when he finds his servants ready — and what is the one thing the unfaithful servant does with the delay? What do those two details tell you about the One who is coming?

2. Which figure from this week’s seven hours do I most resemble right now: the servant who assumes there is time, Eliphaz with his explanations, Jeremiah with his complaint, the grumbler at noon, the Israelite who forgets in plenty, the man who has “found rest,” or Simeon still watching?

3. Where am I using the delay — the quiet belief that there will always be more time — to postpone a reconciliation, a confession, a decision or a change?

4. Whose suffering have I tried to explain, and what would it mean to stay beside them instead?

5. If the Lord came at this hour tomorrow, what would I want him to find me doing — and what will I do each day this week to make that more likely?

A Prayer at the Closing of the Day

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of Man, who will come at an hour we do not expect, and who, when you find us waiting, tie on your belt and serve us at your table:

In the night, keep us watching — not anxious, but awake to you.

At dawn, make us familiar with your ways, so that we agree with you, and not with every voice that claims to speak for you.

When the day turns against us, be our refuge and not our terror; and when we cannot feel that you are near, give us Jeremiah’s honesty to tell you so.

In the heat of noon, quench the flames of strife in us. Make us long-tempered with the people beside us, as you are long-tempered with us.

When the afternoon is long and we grow weary, let us remember the road behind us and the sandals that did not wear out.

At evening, let us want no wage but your blessing, and come before you, as your saints did, with empty hands.

And when we lie down to sleep, let us sleep as Simeon slept, having seen your salvation.

You will lose nothing of all the Father has given you. Do not lose us. On the last day, raise us up with all your saints, to see you as you are.

Into your hands, Lord, we commend our spirits. Amen.

What to Carry

The hour he comes is hidden from you; the hour you are in is not — give him this one.

When the Lamps Are Lit Again

On this Solemnity, the responsorial psalm at Mass carries a refrain that could stand over the whole week: “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face” (Psalm 24). The second reading makes a promise: “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). And the Gospel blesses the pure in heart, “for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8).

The week we have walked ends in seeing. Job, after all his argument: “now my eye sees you.” Simeon, with the child in his arms: “my eyes have seen your salvation.” Jesus, in Capernaum: “all who see the Son and believe in him.” The saints are those who have arrived where that seeing is complete — “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). Among them, we dare to hope, are the people whose names many of us will speak tomorrow.

Tonight, in monasteries and parishes and homes, the Church will close this solemnity with Night Prayer and sing Simeon’s song once more. Tomorrow, on the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, many will hear John 6:37–40 among the readings offered for the day: “I should lose nothing of all that he has given me.” And next Sunday, in parishes of the Roman Rite, the Gospel will be the parable of the ten bridesmaids, whose lamps burned or failed while “the bridegroom was delayed” (Matthew 25:5), and which ends with this week’s question in Jesus’ own words: “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (25:13).

So this Sunday’s question does not close tonight. It walks with us into November.

The sundial is right: we do not know which hour will be the last. The bell is right too. This one can still be given.

Which passage of Scripture would you like us to keep watch with in a future Sunday Series? Share it in the comments. The verse that has been keeping you awake may be the one another reader is waiting for.

Rise & Inspire — Sunday Bible Series Depth over speed. Understanding over volume. Formation over information.

Written by John Britto Kurusumuthu

Each morning, His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur, shares a verse from the Bible. The seven verses received over the course of each week are brought together and serve as the scriptural foundation for that week’s Sunday Bible Series.

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