For us Catholics
and Christians there is a mysterious cohesion between mankind and creation
around us. All life is given or brought
into being by the One true God: with what is material and temporal serving and
supporting all spiritual degrees, and with our own supreme spirit polarized
towards God and eternal life. As a
result of this, things of earth and temporal events can stir our spiritual
awareness; they can help us understand and appreciate something more of God’s
mysterious presence for us in the world, and as we experience it, we are thus encouraged
to live more co-naturally and delightfully with Him and for Him.
Those words of
Jesus:
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 in
the heavens will be shaken;
had been used
earlier in the Old Testament times predicting the ruin of nations hostile to
Israel, as we find the prophet Isaiah (13:10) foretelling the ruin of Babylon
the Great:
For the
stars of heaven and their constellations will not give their light; the sun
will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light.
After Isaiah, another
great prophet Ezekiel (32:7-8) spoke in similar tones of the forthcoming
destruction of Egypt.
Ultimately, the
prophet Joel (2:28-33) used like words to proclaim that most beautiful ‘Day of
the Lord‘ when the Holy Spirit would be poured out on believers in Jesus,
before the wrath of God ultimately destroyed sin and sinners:
And it shall
come to pass afterwards that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh. The sun shall
be turned into darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome
day of the Lord comes. And everyone
who calls on the name of the Lord shall
be saved.
This wondrous ‘pliability’ of earth in
relation to divine dispositions is being seen in our days. The whole world, having largely abandoned the
practice of Christian faith, is now growing ever more alarmed by nature's ‘response’
to such godlessness thus officially abounding: the seasons are less and less
reliable, the earth’s temperature is rising relentlessly, and unheard-of storms
are arising in unheard-of places: snow in desert lands!! The world becomes daily more deeply troubled,
although such alarm is still not able to stir a change that promises relief from
threatening crisis.
We Christians and Catholics must share in the
world’s endeavours, but we do not share in the world’s alarm.
Jesus used that
same type of language to foreshadow God’s final purifying of His People when
evil will be purged away and God’s true servants revealed:
And they
will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. and
then He will send out the angels and gather His elect from the four winds, from
the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.
From the beginning
of His public ministry Jesus had used the title ‘Son of Man’ when speaking of
Himself and now, in the words just quoted, He identified Himself for the first
time as the ‘One seen in a vision’ by that late and great prophet, Daniel
(7:13-14):
I saw in the night visions, and behold, with
the clouds of heaven there came One like a son of man and He came to the
Ancient of days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion,
glory, and kingship; that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him;
His dominion is an everlasting dominion which
shall not pass away, and His kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
In Daniel, the Son
of Man heads the Kingdom of the Saints which is to supersede the heathen
empires of the four beasts (Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome). Jesus now,
therefore, showing Himself to be the Son of Man in Daniel’s prophecy, enables
us to appreciate the fact that, in Him, humankind finds its supreme glory
and God’s People its sublime Head
At present, the
words of today’s second reading are actually being fulfilled:
He offered
one sacrifice for sins, and took His seat forever at the right hand of God; now
He waits until His enemies are made His footstool;
and we, in the
bosom of Mother Church, are being ‘led to justice’ as the first reading put it,
that is, being instructed in virtue and wisdom as we learn to lead our lives in
conformity with Jesus’ teaching and come to know truly – in fact and in
experience -- something of the infinite beauty and boundless goodness of God
our Father.
It is a fact that
today we see all around us ‘the
wicked proving themselves wicked’;
we find that wisdom and understanding, far from being valued and sought
after, are derided and disregarded, while the most abominable practices are
openly flaunted and accepted; indeed, they can even be found covering
themselves over with a cloak of pseudo-respectability in order to mislead, if that
were possible, the elect.
People of God,
recognize where we find ourselves at this juncture in time: the process for the
purification of God’s People and the establishment of His Kingdom has begun,
since Jesus has risen from the dead; He is to be seen and heard, known and
received by those who love Him in His Church; and all this is leading to a
final denouement in which Jesus will be seen by all mankind whether they love
Him or not. He will appear, not humbly
as Bread and Wine totally given over to our need and service, but in all His
glory as the Son of God, Redeemer and Judge of all mankind
In our Gospel
reading Jesus mentioned ‘His 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 (12:10): many shall be purified, cleansed, and refined, because the elect
are those faithful disciples who are being formed into a likeness of their Lord
through their experience of, and response to, life under God’s Providence, by
the sacraments of Mother Church and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, whereby they
are encouraged and enabled to walk perseveringly and faithfully along the way
of Jesus.
Now Jesus speaks of
the coming judgement when He says:
After that
tribulation (the appearance of false messiahs performing their signs and wonders; the world glorying in its freedom to sin) 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 because today
we are not unaware of the primeval powers at work in our own sun and Milky Way,
and in astounding galaxies above and beyond us: galaxies that defy counting and
involve powers and occupy space beyond human imagining.
For the Psalmists
of old, however, the heavens spoke most resoundingly of the glory of God. In those days, though there were few facts
available other than what our human senses could immediately discern, the
Psalmists -- being filled with God’s spiritual gifts of humility and wisdom --
were able to understand and interpret aright what basic facts were known to
them. Today, on the other hand, for many
moderns the facts are so multitudinous and often so tenuous that their minds
are overwhelmed as they seek to co-relate and then co-ordinate them into a
comprehensible whole; and where faith has been lost or rejected, and pride embraced
as a reliable 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 power for no purpose, majesty
with no significance, and beauty alien in its cold irrelevance.
Therefore, dear
People of God, do not let yourselves be troubled by scoffers who ignore the
teaching of truth, who walk, indeed run merrily, along the ways that lead ever
further from God. 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 fulness of joy promised by Our Lord, before ultimately sharing in His
transcendent glory and sublime joy:
When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to Him Who put all things in subjection under Him, that God may be All in all. (1 Corinthians 15:18)
