You hypocrites!
You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky;
why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
We spend a lot of time trying to predict the future. With global pandemics and hotly contested elections we're constant refactoring and reevaluating to try to know the future in advance. We do this too with the lives of those we know, considering their struggles and challenges, and trying to calculate their outcomes. We are especially interested to know our own future. Of course our calculations are wrong more often than they are correct. And even when they are correct, knowing seems to make little difference in our lives. Our need to know stems from a need to be in charge. We feel like knowing is controlling in a way that it really isn't.
Jesus wants us to be more interested in reading the signs of the times that point toward him than in predicting the future. He wants us to get good at finding him at work in the circumstances of the world and to understand more and more how everything is moving toward him as its culmination. Our predictions paralyze us and make us fearful. They narrow our horizons and constrain our vision. Seeing Jesus at work in the world motivates and empowers us because we are then able to focus on what really matters.
make an effort to settle the matter on the way;
We begin from the call we have received. We are called to follow Jesus, to be holy as God himself is holy, and to lay down our lives in love for one another. This is not usually so dramatic as it may first sound. It is mostly about "humility and gentleness, with patience". We are called to invest our effort in "bearing with one another through love". Love gives us the power to bear all things (see First Corinthians 13:7). But we must see the larger horizon of God's plan and the presence of Jesus moment to moment or we will reject the patient love we are called to manifest.
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit
through the bond of peace;
We experience the presence of Jesus and his Spirit as he himself empowers his people to find unity in spite of the bumps in the road along the way, allowing us to transcend our human failings which grate on one another. The failings don't go away first. The grace is for bearing with. And we need to make our peace with this grace now. We need to let the Lord teach us this skill sooner rather than later. If we don't learn the lesson the tests will keep reappearing There is no better time than now for holiness.
I say to you, you will not be released
until you have paid the last penny.
The unity of Spirit is a supernatural reality that will be a cause of joy when we learn to walk by his power. We'll discover relationships that could not exist otherwise, that would long ago have crashed and burned. And yet, these very relationships will be ones that we have learned to treasure. The psalmist wrote of this when he said, "how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!" (see Psalm 133:1)
He shall receive a blessing from the LORD,
a reward from God his savior.
Such is the race that seeks for him,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
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