THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

We are winding down the church year. Next Sunday, the feast of Christ the King, is the last Sunday in our liturgical year. After that, we begin again with Advent. As is usual for this time of year, the readings for this Sunday are about the end-times. The readings for today use apocalyptic language, the language of the end-times: Daniel’s vision, Jesus’  warnings. Apocalyptic language is marked by symbolic images, the expectation of the end of the world and, as the Webster Dictionary says, an “immanent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil.”

In this, the second-to-last week of the Church year, Jesus has finally made it to Jerusalem.

Near to His passion and death, He gives us a teaching of hope—telling us how it will be when He returns again in glory.

Today’s Gospel is taken from the end of a long discourse in which He describes tribulations the likes of which haven’t been seen “since the beginning of God’s creation” . He describes what amounts to a dissolution of God’s creation, a “devolution” of the world to its original state of formlessness and void.

It can be difficult and confusing for us to read these passages, and to try to figure out what they mean and how they apply to our own times. It’s important to remember that, from his words, Jesus appears to have believed that the end of the world was at hand. Paul, and others in the early church after Jesus’ death, also really believed that the end was imminent. They expected that the Kingdom of God would come at any time-hence Paul’s writings about not marrying and not being concerned about the things of this world. They truly believed there was no time to be worried about or distracted by the normal things that people are involved in, because it was all about to be wiped away.

It got more difficult, of course, for the followers of Jesus and the early church as time went on and the end did not come. What, then, were they to think of these writings? How were they to understand them?

 The one thing about the apocalyptic writings, and the writings of the Old Testament prophets, is that there is always hope. The end of the world may come, the old way may be destroyed, but those who obey God’s commandments will be rewarded. The faithful remnant will be saved.

Hope and faithfulness can seem like fleeting things, like foolishness, when our lives and our world are in turmoil. How can we be hopeful in the face of tragedy and loss? How can we remain faithful when things seem hopeless, and we are wondering where God is in the midst of our despair?

Vaclav Havel Former President of the Czech Republic  says, “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”

Both Jesus and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews encourage us to endure, for the sake of the kingdom. We are called to work for something that is good, to work for the Kingdom of God. When we are in our darkest moments, when it all seems overwhelming, sometimes the best we can do is know that somehow God will use our suffering and turn it to good. We may not experience it, we may not recognize it, but for someone our experiences may become icons of God’s kingdom.

As Jesus told the disciples, we do not know when the Kingdom of God will arrive, neither the day nor the hour. We don’t experience the same urgency that Jesus and his followers, or the members of the early church, did. But as the church year winds down,   we also turn once again to the anticipation of the season of Advent and all it foretells. We turn once again to hope in the Light of the World, the hope of our redemption, and the promise of God’s kingdom.