Friends, in today’s Gospel passage, the Lord compares the clueless behavior of our time with that of Noah. Listen to his warning: “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man.’” Those aren’t very reassuring words.
Then he specifies: people were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage right up to the time of the flood, and then, when it came, with shocking suddenness, they were destroyed. The end of an old world had arrived, but the inhabitants of that world were clueless. A new world was coming, but the prospective citizens of it had no idea how to prepare for it.
Our version of Noah’s world-destroying flood might be the crashing of a huge comet into the earth. What if we knew that a comet was coming but did nothing about it, adjusted in no way to it? This was the situation of those in Noah’s time and, Jesus suggests, those in his own time. And it’s our situation too. We must prepare for the Lord’s coming by patterning our lives on the Gospel.