THE THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – B
So, the Church’s Year draws to an end. We have completed the cycle once more and await its glorious conclusion next Sunday with the celebration of the Feast of Christ the King. That celebration will affirm all that has gone before and will support the faith of even the weariest believer struggling along The Way. But before we get to the Feast we must go through the end times and what they will be like. We shall see that those times will not be for the faint of heart, and especially not for those who lose sight of what we were called to be and what this journey along the Way is all about.
We in the Northern Hemisphere have signs surrounding us that support the Word proclaimed in these readings. Light wanes. In much of the country cold takes hold and wind and rain strip the trees of their once green leaves. Bare limbs reach up into the heavens pleading for light’s return, and warmth and spring. Depending on the severity of this season, those who experience it may wonder if winter will yield this time. Will there be the renewal of life and vegetation? We’re people of faith, remember. Trial does not mean defeat. No winter is forever. God’s love is constant and unconditional. We have God’s Son’s death to prove that. And the Resurrection!
There are televangelists who milk the First Reading from the Prophet Daniel and this Sunday’s Gospel reading from Mark and use them to strike terror in the hearts of their hearers. Fear for some may be a motive for towing the moral line but fear will neither inspire nor long support faith. The highways and byways are strewn with those who could stand the condemning message no more and gave up on the faith. Did you know that Former Catholics is the second largest denomination of believers exceeded only by those who still claim to be members of the faith? Alas.
Beware of fundamentalism. Properly interpreted, the First Reading and the Gospel for this Sunday are not meant to inspire dread, much less seen as condemnatory. The End Times means that things as we know them will pass away and horrors may be part of those days. Remember last spring when the lilacs first bloomed and the daffodils blanketed the hillsides? Then came the warmth of summer and the zephyrs that made the aspen leaves flash like sunlight through prisms in the trees. On an ideal summer day, did you sit beneath a willow, dappled by the suns glow and wish these days would go on forever?
Israel knew glory days. Jerusalem, bedecked in jewels, with the Temple at its heart would certainly be eternal, wouldn’t it? But then came destruction of the city and of the Temple and the people were led away enslaved like their ancestors before them had been in Egypt. A winter of discontent descended upon God’s chosen ones, a time unsurpassed in distress since nations began until that time. But that is not where the reading ends. The hearer is not invited to peer down into a bottomless chasm of despair. Rather there is an invitation to remember God’s fidelity. In the worst times some people will escape and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake…and live forever. That is the word for those who are faithful to the call. We don’t have to go into the fate that awaits the unfaithful ones. We remember that Jerusalem was restored. The Babylonian captivity ended. The people returned rejoicing.
Israel has known times of suffering in many ages down through the centuries. Among the worst of times was the Holocaust during Hitler’s reign. That horror is not without parallel. The sufferings of others who endured the ravages of ethnic cleansing in other countries are etched in our memories. At least they ought to be. Think of the Hutus and the Tutsis of recent memory in Uganda and Rhodesia. The Serbs and the Croats. There can be only estimates about the numbers of millions of Russian people Stalin exterminated. The point is that each of these atrocities would qualify as the worst of times. Daniel speaks to those who suffered and to their survivors. Death will not hold sway forever. Tyrannies will end. And the dead will rise to vindication. God is faithful and bring his own from every nation safely home.
Jesus quotes Daniel at the beginning of the gospel: In those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Is it possible to imagine a scene more terrifying? What is the purpose of the quote here? We have to think back over the journey that we began at the start of this Church’s Year. We have to remember our own individual faith journeys along The Way. We must ponder the reality of each Eucharist we celebrated and each Meal that we shared.
Jesus, through every lesson that he taught and through every healing at his touch and through the feeding of the multitudes and the announcing of the good news to the poor, proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. That said, we also know that there has been a struggle to accept the kind of Messiah that he is. Some imagine Jesus to be the mighty, all-powerful warrior, the one who will drive away all oppressors and set up a secure kingdom forever. The Jews would not have the Romans enslaving them ever again. Some hold that should hold true for every enemy in every age since then – if Jesus was the Messiah. And, too, in the Lord’s time and in every age since there were those who saw Jesus as a way to their own power and wealth as they lusted after the positions at his right and left in the Kingdom.
It ought to be safe for us who have listened this year to say such thoughts and values are not in the message Jesus was sent from the Father to deliver. Jesus models himself after Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. Servant is the operative word of the one who always sought out the little ones, the lost sheep, the poor, the blind, the lepers and the lame. This Messiah is the one who scandalized many by the company he kept and by those for whom he practiced table fellowship. Tax collectors. Prostitutes. Roman legionaries. Gentiles. Name an unsavory group of his time that did not have representation at his table. Even women reclined at his table. The challenge for all of them, if they were to be his disciples, would be to do what Jesus did and to exhibit a poverty of life that bespeaks a complete and total dependence on God and a trust in God’s promises. The command will be to love one another as they are loved. One can not be invincible and do that.
Then Jesus speaks of those days. They will be days of great trial. The faith of many will be broken. How can a Messiah reign if he is led away, scourged, crowned with thorns, carries a cross, is crucified and dies like so many common criminals before him who had made Calvary a common place for execution? How can the Messianic age have followed Jesus’ time if Jerusalem and the Temple are destroyed again? Most of the disciples ran away, scandalized by the death Jesus died. But we know that was not the end. Jesus rose on the Third Day and ended death’s tyranny forever. That is what the disciples had to remember as Jesus, resurrected, reclaimed them. That is what disciples in every age must remember as new horrors abound.
Remember spring. Even the deepest winter yields to spring’s thaw as life and light return. The promise that we are to cling to, the second spring in which we are to live is the yearning for the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise that we will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.
What does it mean to live in faith? It means that we remain convinced of the promise of the Second Coming in spite of the direst signs to the contrary. It means that each of us determines what the Lord is calling him or her to be and how we are to serve and then, with the Lord’s grace to strengthen us, strives to live that calling. It means that we are to be a Eucharistic people, gathering each Lord’s Day to renew his dying and rising in Bread and Wine, the prayer of Thanksgiving. It means that we take and eat, take and drink, and do this in Jesus’ memory until he comes again. It means that having eaten and drunk we allow ourselves to be bread broken and cup poured out until all from the four winds, and from the end of the earth to the end of the sky have been fed and know the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We don’t know the day or the hour when the glory will be revealed, only that it has been and will be once again. Do you believe this?
Sincerely,
Didymus
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