33rd. Sunday
(Year B) (Daniel 12:1-3; Hebrews
10:11-14, 18; Mark 13:24-32)
My dear
brothers and sisters in Christ, in the Scripture readings today we are
encouraged to consider something the world wants to ignore, indeed, something
the world fears to such an extent that it will not even entertain the
possibility of it: namely, God’s coming Judgement of our human actions,
intentions, and aspirations, not in some abstract and derisory inquisition with
detailed, pernickety, proof and resulting condemnation, but in an immediately
present and incontrovertible human awareness of personal failure: personal
rejection of and alienation from the eternal glory and merciful goodness of
God.
Jesus
came among us some 2000 years ago and spoke as did people of His time using a
vocabulary built up from the thoughts and experiences of ordinary human beings
in ordinary human circumstances and with normal human aspirations and cares. However, the message He brought was from God,
His Father, and He spoke not only for His own time but also for humanity to
come even to our 21st. century and beyond.
His words, therefore, are not scientific words but they are sublimely
truthful words for human beings with a divine purpose and destiny to fulfil; they
alone can give, convey to, human awareness a truthful apprehension of what,
by its very nature, is both unimaginable because totally unique and
inconceivable because sublimely spiritual.
We
Catholic and Christian disciples of Jesus, being well aware that He once said:
Heaven
and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away,
are today
not only reminded of the eternal truth of Christian teaching concerning the
fact of judgement to come, but are also re-assured that the righteous will be
rewarded and fulfilled in that judgement.
The
prophet Daniel, continuing our first reading (cf. Daniel 12:10), spoke words
which we find verified by our own experience and that of Mother Church in our
world today:
Many
shall be refined, purified, and tested, but the wicked shall prove wicked; the
wicked shall have no understanding, but those with insight shall.
It is,
indeed, a fact today that we see all around us “the wicked proving themselves
wicked”; we find that wisdom and understanding, far from being valued and
sought after, are disparaged and disregarded, while the most abominable
practices are openly flaunted and being covered over with a cloak of
pseudo-respectability to such an extent that some simple Catholics are being troubled,
as Jesus foretold:
False
messiahs and false prophets will arise and will perform signs and wonders in
order to mislead, if that were possible, the elect. (Mark 13:22)
In our
Gospel reading Jesus again mentions “the elect” as you heard:
Then they
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.
Who are
these “elect”? Daniel told us in those
words: "many shall be refined, purified, and tested”; because the elect
are those faithful disciples who, throughout their life on earth, are being
formed into a likeness of their Lord through the Scriptures, the sacraments of
Mother Church, and the gifts of His Holy Spirit, whereby they are enabled to
walk perseveringly and faithfully along the ways of Jesus. A notable part of the purifying and forming
of the faithful elect is accomplished by the sufferings they have to endure in
order to remain true to Jesus despite the allurements and trials of life; and
today mockery is one of the great trials Christians have to endure for Jesus,
especially mockery of Jesus’ teaching about a future judgement:
After
that tribulation (false messiahs performing their signs and wonders), 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 in the heavens will be shaken.
We can
imagine something of the calamitous nature of such pre-judgement events, for
today we are not unaware of the astounding forces at work in our own sun and
Milky Way, and in the myriads of stars and countless galaxies around and beyond
us: galaxies involving powers and occupying space and time we try to account
for and measure but are utterly unable to comprehend.
All this
comes about because of the nature and extent of our scientific knowledge. Every day new facts about the world around us
are being discovered; but -- without understanding – facts, like statistics,
are ultimately meaningless and empty.
As, over the decades and centuries, our probes into the secrets of
nature have extended ever wider and deeper, scientists have found it
increasingly difficult to gain a comprehensive appreciation of such an immense
diversity of facts old and new that they can embrace and learn from. Newton came up with one such an
understanding, which we call a hypothesis, which seemed to embrace and unify
the then known facts, and caused scientific circles great rejoicing. But still more facts continued to come in
and eventually there was so much that was new and inexplicable that a further
hypothesis had to be found. Einstein
came up with another explanation, another new hypothesis, which again rejoiced
the minds of scientists, and again led many to think “Now we can explain all
things.” The flow of new facts
continues however, and not all fit into even our very-latest hypotheses and so,
yet again, scientific thinkers seek to come up with still other working hypotheses
that might seem to offer a unifying explanation of all the facts we think we
know. Understanding always lags far
behind the facts for scientists; hypotheses can only try to explain our
universe on the basis of present experience and observation, and today we are
becoming increasingly aware that we experience very, very little of the
totality of what is real.
Think of
it in this way: when it is light we see, and we then think that light shows us
everything. Normally, however, we only
experience ordinary light, whereas science tells us that such ordinary light
contains many, many, different wavelengths, each revealing different objects,
such as infra-red light, ultra-violet rays, X rays, all opening different views
of what we had thought we knew well enough.
Now,
People of God, we are not really concerned with science here; but we Catholics
and Christians live in God’s world and because it is God’s world created for
us, we are interested in, admire, make great use of, and should respect, the
world as such. However, though we live in the world, we live that life
in the world for God. Ultimately therefore, all our knowledge of
the world is desirable only in so far as thereby we learn to admire God’s
wisdom and power, beauty (just look at the truly heavenly pictures sent us by
Hubble!) and goodness, ever more and more and, above all, in so far as we are
thereby helped to live our life-on-earth for Him more gratefully and fittingly,
in a more truly and fully human -- that is, divinely-aware-and-responsive --
manner.
Some of
the psalmists of old epitomize that life for us: to them the heavens did indeed
speak most glowingly of the glory of God!
In those days, there were relatively few scientific facts available
other than what our human senses could immediately discern; nevertheless, being
filled with the gifts of humility and wisdom, the psalmists were able to
understand and interpret appropriately what facts were known to them and
wholeheartedly rejoice before God.
Today, however, for many moderns, the facts are so multitudinous and
often so tenuous that the human mind is overwhelmed as it seeks to co-relate
them into a comprehensible whole. And
where faith is lost and pride is embraced and acknowledged as an acceptable
guide, many falsely interpret what they have correctly but only partially
observed, with the result that their reading of the heavens proclaims not the
Glory and the Goodness of God, but rather reflects their own purposeless
appreciation of primeval and chaotic power, expanding and exhausting itself in time and space – not indeed totally
outside our knowledge, but far beyond the comprehension of minds unwilling to
learn humility from what surpasses them.
We
Christians, however, want to learn from the glory of God resplendent in the
heavens above; and, from the goodness and mercy of God manifest in Jesus and in
the Scriptures of Mother Church, we want to learn how we can prepare for that
coming judgement so as to find eternal blessedness. For, as our readings today warn us, when the
Judgement Day comes:
Many of
those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some shall live forever,
others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.
Now is
the time of trial: even at this very moment, the process of choosing and
preparing the elect is going on all over the world, going on in you and me.
But the
wicked shall prove wicked; none of them shall have understanding.
It has
always been so, the wicked rejoice in their wickedness and manage to persuade
themselves that there is nothing that can happen to them after death by surrounding
themselves with others who think likewise, by distracting their minds with
ever-new projects, and by silencing their consciences with pleasures that can
satiate but not satisfy. Nevertheless,
for those who seek to live before God and show themselves willing to be guided
by Mother Church and her Scriptures,
Many
shall be refined, purified, and tested (by the grace of the Holy
Spirit and the light of Jesus’ teaching) and the wise shall have understanding.
There
lies our vocation, People of God: whilst we have the time, we are called to
seek understanding and urged to live wisely, for:
Those who
are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn
many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever.
Therefore,
dear People of God, do not let yourselves be troubled by scoffers who ignore
the teaching of divine truth, who walk, indeed run, merrily, along ways that
lead to destruction. Let Mother Church
guide you, let the Spirit of Jesus lead you, to righteousness and insight; for
then you will come to know, even here on earth, something of the plenitude of
peace and fullness of joy promised by Our Lord, before ultimately sharing in
His transcendent glory when those other words of His find their ultimate
fulfilment:
(You) 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.
