The passage from Luke 17: 26-37 presents us with one of Scripture's most unsettling paradoxes: the people of Noah's generation perished not because they were committing extraordinary evils, but because they were living extraordinarily ordinary lives. They ate, they drank, they married—all legitimate activities, all necessary for human existence. Yet Jesus uses this very normalcy as a warning of spiritual catastrophe—you are called to be much more than just eating, drinking, and making merry.
What made their destruction inevitable was not the activities themselves, but the totalising absorption in them. They had become so enclosed within the immediate that they lost the capacity to perceive the ultimate. The floodwaters rising around them were not merely meteorological but metaphysical—they represented the consequences of a society that had made comfort its compass and self-interest its creed.
This is the danger Jesus warns against: not dramatic apostasy, but a kind of spiritual anesthesia. When eating and drinking—when the endless pursuit of our own satiation—becomes the organising principle of existence, we lose the ability to recognise danger even when it announces itself. We become deaf to warnings because warnings require us to acknowledge something beyond our appetites, beyond our plans, beyond ourselves.
Refusal itself can become a way of life. When people refuse to see danger, refuse to change, refuse to run toward what demands uncomfortable transformation, they create "vultures of self interests." These are societies where everyone is feeding, but no one is nourishing anything beyond themselves. The body social continues its mechanical functions—eating, drinking, buying, selling—while its soul weakens and shrivels.
The biblical parallel to Lot's time deepens this meditation. Those cities too were destroyed not in the midst of their wickedness confessing itself, but in the midst of their wickedness disguised as business-as-usual. They ate, they drank, they made merry—and the very merriment was their blindness. They had mistaken the absence of immediate catastrophe for the presence of ultimate security.
What transforms eating and drinking from legitimate sustenance into spiritual sedation? It is the closure of concern—when our circle of care contracts to encompass only ourselves and our immediate gratifications. When we become "mindless of others," we don't simply fail in charity; we fail in perception. We lose the ability to see the larger patterns, the gathering storms, the structural injustices that our comfort may be built upon.
Every age produces its exploiters, yes—but it also produces its enablers: those who see exploitation and choose comfort, who recognise injustice and choose convenience, who perceive danger and choose distraction. The people of Noah's day were perhaps not the perpetrators of the worst evils, but they were the maintainers of the system that allowed those evils to flourish. Their eating and drinking was not neutral; it was the lubricant that kept the machinery of corruption running smoothly.
Maintain vigilance against the tyranny of the normal and the failure to dream. For in the end, societies perish not with their eyes wide open in terror, but with their eyes half-closed in contentment, not recognising that they have mistaken numbness for peace, and distraction for life itself.
Comments
Post a Comment