33rd Sunday 2019
Malachi 3:19-20; 2Thess 3:7-12; Luke 21:5-19
This is the penultimate Sunday of the Church’s year, and as always on this Sunday, our thoughts are directed to the Four Last Things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. In this part of the world, it seems appropriate: the year is visibly dying around us. The days are short; the temperature is falling, though not as fast as the leaves; coughs and splutters are the order of the day, as the doctors’ surgeries urge us to have flu jabs.
In the dark days and long nights of winter, it becomes so much easier to recognise that we are not constructed to last: that we have built-in obsolescence.
Our readings reinforce what nature is telling us. Malachi prophesies the day of the Lord, a day of judgement, which will separate the wheat from the chaff; and we would be very foolish if we were so smug as to assume that we inevitably fall into the former category. Do we genuinely have fear of the Lord: not a servile fear, but a reverence which seeks God’s will in all things? Catholics generally have a healthy distrust of those self-satisfied people who ask “Are you saved?”, in supreme self-confidence that they are. We can only answer “By God’s grace, I hope so.”
St. Paul reminds us to be constantly doing the Lord’s work. This does not mean making a nuisance of ourselves, like those pedlars of instant salvation; but seeing God in every moment, every situation of our lives, and seeking to respond to His call. It is interesting that Paul urges us “to go on quietly working”, not making a show or fuss about what we are doing for the Lord, but simply getting on with the job.
Then we come to the Gospel, where Our Lord warns the disciples that even the Temple, the awesome symbol of God’s presence in the nation, will not last. In what Jesus says about the end of things, there is always a double strand. He speaks first of the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the Temple, which was to happen in 70 AD, as the Romans ruthlessly suppressed the ill-judged Jewish revolt; but He looks beyond that to the end of all things, and it is not always easy to separate the two strands.
We can see, though, how this double strand plays out in our own lives. For each of us individually, the day of our death and judgement will come. This will mark, not the end of the world, but the end of our earthly pilgrimage; yet it can serve as a reminder that the end of all things will eventually arrive.
Do we see other signs in our contemporary world? There are more wars and revolutions than you can shake the proverbial stick at. People thought of the First World War as “the war to end war”, yet in a little over twenty years, the world was convulsed by an even more bitter and destructive conflict.
Those of you who remember the 50s and 60s will recall how we lived in the shadow of the Bomb, expecting nuclear destruction to rain on us at any time. The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to herald a new era of peace, but that proved to be a false dawn. And today the threat of ecological disaster menaces us with a destruction more comprehensive than any brought about by armaments.
Persecutions too, as prophesied by Jesus, are plentiful. Apparently the twentieth century produced more Christian martyrs than all previous centuries combined, and the trend continues. Wherever we look, we see signs of impermanence, and of the limits of time.
So how do we respond? As both St. Paul and Our Lord instruct us, we go on quietly working, fulfilling God’s call to us in the here and now. As we do so, we keep in mind that we live each day in the light of eternity; that whilst we strive to build God’s Kingdom on earth, we recognise that it will reach fulfilment only in the world to come. And while we live in reverence and awe, we do so trusting always in the Lord’s words: “Your endurance will win you your lives.”
