This Sunday is the penultimate Sunday of this year of grace. Each liturgical year we celebrate/live out (of)/ritually reenact the Paschal Mystery. Hence, the theme of this Sunday is "The End Is Near!" "Time is is nearly up!" "Christ will come soon."
Each time we profess our faith by confessing the Creed, we affirm the Church's conviction that "...he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his Kingdom will have no end." Even some 2,000 years on, Christianity remains an apocalyptic religion. Christians should always live with urgency and purpose.
Our purpose? The realization of God's Kingdom, making it present in this dialectical time between the already and the not yet of God's Kingdom. Living this way makes us odd. But it is also what makes us people of hope. Our hope is borne from the love of God we have experienced in Christ through the power of their Spirit, whom we revere as "Holy".
The time of "distress" mentioned in our reading from the book of Daniel is now. It is always now. For Christians, it is the end of the world until the end of the world. Key to this is Jesus's assertion about his return "that day or hour, no one knows" (Mark 9:32). Pondering the end of the world, the question, as REM posed it, is Do you feel fine? In a way, Jesus's resurrection marked the beginning of the end. His return will be mean mark God's completion of creation.
In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul writes that "We," that is, Christians "know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now" (Rom 8:22). He goes on to point out that even those of us who possess "the firstfruits of the Spirit groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies" (Rom 8:23). Nonetheless, we experience this time of distress with hope. "For in hope we are saved" (Rom 8:24).
Hope, it should go without saying, lies on the far side of optimism. In this passage from Romans, the apostle points to this: "Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees?" (Rom 8:24). To have hope is to light a in the darkness of faith.
In the Virgin's Holy Rosary, the fruit of the third Sorrowful Mystery, which is Jesus's crowning with thorns, is courage. Sister Lucia, one of the Fatima visionaries, insisted that one of Our Lady's messages to her and her two cousins was exactly this courage- the courage to follow Christ in the concrete circumstances of your daily life. Of course, as did Saint Bernadette before them, these children were courageous by remaining faithful to their experience in the face of no little hostility.
Hope, as our first reading from Daniel also indicates, means having the courage to work for justice. Working for justice is an expression of hope because, while we can certainly achieve a more just society, we will never achieve a perfectly just society on this side of the eschaton. Comprehending the latter does not negate the former. Working for justice, which seeks results in the real world, not mainly or even preferably through the exercise of political power, but through the conversion of hearts realized through love, is what prepares the way for the full realization of God's kingdom.
Working for justice also helps make us fit for God's kingdom, which is, as the Preface for the Eucharistic Prayer on Christ the King indicates, "a kingdom of justice, love and peace. As Pope Saint Paul VI, in his 1972 message for the World Day Peace (1 January), insisted: "If you want peace, work for justice."
No matter how you parse it, faith fosters good works. "Faith" that is passive, content with the odd abstraction that one need not respond in love to what the Father has accomplished in the Son by the power of the Spirit, is not faith. It is nothing. Faith is our response to God's initiative toward us. No, you can't save yourself. But faith that is true faith is fruitful. Its fruitfulness arises from the fertile ground of God's love.
As Christians, our response to "Christ is coming soon" is Maranatha!. מרנאתא (i.e., Maranatha), is the cry of the Church from her beginning. Maranatha is an Aramaic word that means "Come, our Lord."
Our response to the end of time is hopeful. After the Feast of Christ the King, which we celebrate next Sunday, the final Sunday of this liturgical year, the following Sunday we begin the season of Advent. Derived from the Latin word adventus, Advent is not a season of waiting. Rather, it is a season of hope-filled anticipation. So, we pick up where we left off.
This somewhat complex point is brought home by an anecdote of Saint Francis of Assisi. Like many stories about Francesco, this one may be somewhat legendary. However, it tells us something true about Francis and about being a Christian:
One day, while Francis was working in the communal garden, a brother approached him and asked what he would do if Christ were to return that very moment. Francis responded that he would simply keep working in the gardenThat, my friends, is a hopeful outlook. Fortitude, or courage, is the virtue, the habit, of following Christ no matter what, through thick and thin, as it were.
Liturgy, our experience of the Paschal Mystery through it year after year, both reveals and fosters our hope. Christianity is mystagogical. It is not merely words but gestures, singing, postures, community. As a friend said to me in a phone call yesterday: "We need to teach people how to pray the Mass."
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