33rd Sunday 2021
Daniel 12: 1-3; Hebrews 10:11-14, 18; Mark 13:24-32
A few days ago I had a haircut. As I looked into the mirror after the event, I realised that what had been a fly’s footpath of a parting was now a dual carriageway. My head, like Caesar’s Gaul, is now divided into three parts, with hair to right and left, and (almost) unadorned bonce in the middle.
Going back almost twelve years, I made my debut in semi-professional football at the age of 59, taking the place of an injured assistant referee (linesman in old money) for around sixty minutes of a Northern Premier League fixture. Whatever the difficulties in terms of decision making, there were no physical problems: I could run the touchline with barely a thought, and didn’t need glasses to see across the pitch.
A little over a month ago, an identical situation arose. This time it was a matter of forty five minutes, plus four minutes of stoppage time. My glasses had to remain in place throughout, and by the end of the match, my right calf was complaining bitterly. Clearly, some things have changed.
All of us are inevitably growing older, and therefore closer to death, from the moment we are conceived. For a number of years it is an uphill advance towards physical (and, one hopes, psychological and spiritual) maturity until a plateau is reached, and we begin to descend, at least physically. The longer we live, the more reminders of mortality we receive. On this earth, at least, we are not built to last.
The same is true of our world. Those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s, did so in the shadow of The Bomb. As a child, I took it for granted that, as my grandfather had been called up for the First World War and my father for the Second, so I would be called up for the Third. Even for a less childish mind, that would have been a not unreasonable assumption. The danger that the Cold War would become hot, destroying the world in a nuclear holocaust, was real, especially at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Now we are aware of another threat to humankind’s survival, one which is already taking its toll. No one apart from a handful of cranks now doubts the reality of climate change, as the polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise, and pollution spreads over land and sea. Whether the COP 26 conference will lead to genuine change is anybody’s guess, though most people have grasped the irony of thousands of delegates travelling to and fro in private jets and motorcades of SUVs.
Today is the last Sunday but one of the Church’s year, and, as always on this day, the Mass readings bring us stark reminders of life’s limits. We are going to die, and our world is going to end. When the latter will happen, even Jesus in His humanity did not know, though we can form a rough, but unreliable, estimate of our own life span.
From the Book of Daniel, written at a time of deep crisis for the Jewish people, when the land was occupied by a Seleucid army and the Temple had been desecrated, we receive warnings of a time of unparalleled distress, as the writer interprets present sufferings as a prelude to worse to come. Meanwhile, the Gospel points to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple on the one hand, and to the end of the world and the return in glory of the Son of Man on the other, the former foreshadowing the latter.
All of this reminds us to be in a state of readiness. As the years pass, our bodies give us increasing hints that death will come to us one day: the calamities resulting from global warming bring ever increasing awareness of the world’s fragility. While we do all in our power to prevent or delay the destruction of the planet, we accept our own built in obsolescence, and ask ourselves “Am I ready for my final encounter with the Lord?” which may come at any time, perhaps even today.
