27-08-2026, Thursday of Twenty First Week in Ordinary Time
Memorial of Saint Monica
κλέπτης (Gk) (kleptes) (an embezzler, a thief En) (Mt 24:43)
Is not kleptes (thief) a shocking image for Jesus? And yet it is to a thief that he compares himself. To subvert our conventional way of looking at things and thus open us up to truly new perspectives, the Word of God often resorts to shock tactics. By referring to himself in the third person in the three consecutive phrases “your Lord is coming” (v. 42), “the thief was coming” (v. 43) and “the Son of man is coming” (v. 44), Jesus is urging us to search in the image “thief” for more than just a passing illustration.
Even beyond the Gospels, the New Testament abounds in references to Jesus as thief, always in connection with his glorious Parousia: “Behold, I am coming like a thief, Blessed is he who is awake, keeping his garments that he may not go naked and be seen exposed!” (Rev 16:15). And he also says: “If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you” (Rev 3:3). Paul, for his part, exhorts: “You yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night…. But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief” (1 Thess 5:2, 4). Each time the image of “thief” appears in such declarations, it conveys a mixed message of boldness and ambiguity that produces in us a certain unease. Something in our piety resists envisioning Jesus as a “thief” in any sense whatever.
Yet, in the Second Letter of Peter, we see the most explicit description of the shattering consequences of this thief’s arrival: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be” (2 Pet 3:10-11). All of these stark affirmations by the Word of God radically overturn what are perhaps the two most tightly clutched assumptions we men make about our present existence: first, that our life in this world will last forever, if not individually, then at least collectively through our descendants and through the works we leave behind us and people’s memories of us; and, second, that my life is mine because I am lord and master over myself. We are all enslaved, and our inner vision pitifully skewed, by these twin illusions of perdurance and of autonomy. For Christians, the world, because it came out of nothing, is not eternal; it is, therefore, subject at the very least to extreme transformations and, indeed, to ultimate “dissolution”. “The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth” (Ps 97:5). We begin to realize that our difficulty with Jesus the Thief is rooted precisely in our clutching our existence and persons as if they belonged by rights to ourselves and no one else. Anyone coming to claim them from us, even if it be Jesus himself, is going to feel to us like a thief. And so, Jesus, always anticipating our reactions, casts himself preemptively in the role of a thief.
Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, in the ‘Yellow Notebook’ of her ‘Last Conversations’ writes, “It’s said in the Gospel that God will come like a thief. He will come to steal me away in the nicest way possible. Oh, how I’d love to aid the Thief!” Then on July 7, after she has once again coughed up blood, her sister Pauline (Mother Agnes of Jesus) asks her: “Are you afraid of the Thief? This time he is at the door!” To which Thérèse replies at once: “No, he’s not at the door, he’s already come in. But how can you ask me, my dear Mother, whether I’m afraid of the Thief? How could I be afraid of someone I love so much?!” Three days later, on July 10, after another hemoptysis around midnight, Thérèse exclaims: “No one can make me last one minute longer than the Thief wants.” Finally, on July 31, she returns three times to the image of the thief. To Pauline she says: “Yes, I’ll steal. …Many things will disappear from Heaven because I’ll bring them to you. I’ll be a little thief; I’ll take whatever I please.” And later the same day she even makes up, in colloquial French, a humorous little jingle about her awaited intruder: The Thief will come, ha, And take me off, ha, Alleluia! Still later that day she uses the image for the last time: “I was thinking I should be a dear and wait for the Thief very quietly.” What is most impressive in all of this is the way in which, during her last agony and with her usual playfulness, so indicative of interior freedom, St. Thérèse accomplishes a living exegesis of our Gospel text, rewriting it quite literally with her lifeblood, which was flowing out of her lungs in the frequent bouts of hemoptysis common in those suffering from tuberculosis. We know how excruciating her sufferings became toward the end. Among the last words that her sister Celine (Sister Genevieve) recorded on September 30, minutes before Thérèse died, we read the very last words are: “My God …I …love you!” In her painful death, Thérèse joyously welcomes the active intervention of the One who promises solemnly: “And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (Jn 14:3). “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev 21:5).
What about you and me? Do we hold on to our world? Do we think our life is eternal? Or are we waiting to be taken by God, ready to leave this world to an eternal life with Him.