When the doctor's diagnosis tells you to get your things in order......

When the doctor’s diagnosis tells you to get your things in order……

You have a month or a week and possibly a few days before your life is terminally over.  What type of precautions should I take to alert those I love that I will be dying shortly?  

Jesus had a short prognosis when entering Jerusalem before his Passion.  He had to prepare his disciples for an outlook that none of them wanted to hear or even live through in the next several days.  How to prepare for his departure would not be easy, but he did have a plan that would assist them in understanding what lay ahead for them.  

After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.  And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.  Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus.  Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; then from the cloud came a voice, “This is my beloved Son.  Listen to him.”  (Mk 9: 2 - 4, 7).

The first step in how to prepare them for his departure which in itself would startle and discourage his disciples.  This incident would prove beyond any doubt that his Passion was the answer to the mission that Jesus took upon himself.

Secondly, the Last Supper instituted the two attributes of what their ministry was to be all about;  the priesthood and the Holy Eucharist.  The next sign of what the crucifixion would entail was written years before his Incarnation:  From here he had only hours left before being arrested. 

Who would believe what we have heard?  To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  He grew up like a sapling before him, like a shoot from the parched earth; There was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him, nor appearance that would attract us to him.  He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, One from whom men hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem.  Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured, While we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted.  But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins, upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.  We had all gone astray like sheep, each following his own way; But the Lord laid upon him the guilt of us all.  (Is 53: 1 - 6).

It is this mystery of Christ that the Church proclaims and celebrates in her liturgy so that the faithful may live from it and bear witness to it in the world:  (CCC 1068) 

For it is the liturgy, especially in the divine sacrifice of the Eucharist, that “the work of our redemption is accomplished,” and it is through the liturgy especially that the faithful are enabled to express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church.   (Sacrosanctum concilium).

Ralph B. Hathaway