The Last Judgement, by Fra Angelico. “We must always be ready, for our own death and the death of the world,” writes Father Hawkswell. (Wikimedia Commons)
33rd
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First
Reading: Dn
12:1-3
Second
Reading: Heb
10:11-14, 18
Gospel
Reading: Mk
13:24-32
Every time I read that “together we can build a world without breast cancer,” or “prostate cancer,” etc., I wonder what people imagine will happen to us if we succeed. As my friend says, something has to “knock us off our perch!”
It is foolish to talk or think or plan as though we can ever abolish death. God destined us not for this world, but for life in heaven with him. Death is the changeover from one to the other. When we die, God calls us to himself.
It is not inappropriate, then, for a Christian actually to desire death. Consider how the saints have regarded it. “To me, ‘life’ means Christ; hence dying is so much gain” – St. Paul. “I want to see God and, in order to see him, I must die” – St. Teresa of Avila. “I am not dying; I am entering life” – St. Thérèse of Lisieux. “We should have a daily familiarity with death, a daily desire for death” – St. Ambrose.
The Church encourages us to prepare for death. We ask God to deliver us “from a sudden and unforeseen death.” We ask our Lady to pray for us “at the hour of our death.” We pray to St. Joseph as the patron of a happy death.
Immediately after death, God judges each of us according to our faith and our acts. If, then, we say “Thy will be done,” God grants us his will for us: the perfect happiness of heaven (either immediately or after a purification). If we refuse, he says, “Then thy will be done,” and gives us what we demand: eternal damnation.
In this world, we have no security. We will all die, and the world itself will end.
The “good news of the Kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world,” Jesus promised. “Only after that will the end come.” In the days that precede it, Michael, the protector of God’s people, shall arise. “There shall be a time of anguish” such as has never occurred before. The sun and the moon will go dark and the stars will fall from heaven.
“Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky,” Jesus said, and all people will “strike their breasts” as they see him coming “with power and great glory.” We will not be able to avoid him, for “as the lightning from the east flashes to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.”
No one knows when this will happen. Things will go on as usual, right up to the end, just as they did in the days before the Flood. And therefore we must “stay awake,” Jesus said. He will come when we least expect him.
Notice these four points: 1) the end will be sudden and violent, not gradual; 2) everyone will see Christ returning; 3) we cannot possibly tell when the world will end; and so 4) we must always be ready.
That is all we know. It is a waste of time trying to figure out when the end will come. As Scottish novelist and clergyman George MacDonald said, “Do those who say, lo here or lo there are the signs of his coming, think to be too keen for him, and spy his approach? When he tells them to watch lest he find them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that, and watch lest he should succeed in coming like a thief!”
We need not fear. Christ has already “overcome the world.” He has “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins,” by which he makes us perfect as his Father is perfect. Now he sits at God’s right hand, waiting until his enemies are made “a footstool for his feet.”
Those “found written” in God’s book will be delivered. However, we must always be ready, for our own death and the death of the world.
Father Hawkswell teaches a free course on the Catholic faith on Mondays until Pentecost: from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. Anthony’s Parish, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver, and again from 7 to 9 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way (just off 33rd Avenue between Oak and Cambie). Everyone is welcome, Catholic or non-Catholic.