Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Nov. 14, 2010
Fr. Anthony Brankin
Gospel: Luke 21:5-19. Portents of the end of the world
(Sorry, no audio)
Entire homily text: As a kid, I used to live for the last Sundays of the Church year. All the trees had now become a malevolent tangle of grey branches reaching into a grey sky; and the air would be redolent of dead and decaying leaves. And even in our dark churches, you could see—by the light of a thousand flickering candles—all the babushk’ed widows—praying for their dead—as the priest in black vestments would solemnly intone his Requiem.
Consider a life of prayer and teaching. Saint Francis de Sales’ “little virtues” of gentleness, kindness, humility, and cheerful optimism shape our monastic life. Washington, DC
It seemed that November was declaring to one and all: Welcome to the end of Life—welcome to the end of the world. And then the Last Sunday’s Gospel would be about the end of the world!—highlighted of course by the illustrations in our St. Joseph hymnals. There Jesus warns about abominations and tribulations and fleeing from housetops and how terrible it will be if you are pregnant or if it happens in the winter. The anti-Christs will appear here and there—saying “Look I am the Christ.” And “NO I am the Christ.” And all of this in the midst of earthquakes and cataclysms, planets stars and suns spinning and falling.
Of course if the readings weren’t enough—we used to hear that seers were saying that the End of the World would be presaged by five days of darkness. Now, only a sixth grader could hear about the End of the World and think: Boy! will that be cool!
Well it won’t be cool. The older I get the more I realize that the End of the World is really something to dread—and the reason is that the End of the World will involve no small amount of suffering—both before during and after the End If as Jesus tells us, there will be wars and rumors of wars, and nation rising against nation, and famines and plagues, then how does that not involve us? Can it be that all these things will forever happen to people on the opposite side of the world and never to us?
How long can we go on thinking that mass suffering is the lot of others and not of us? That being hungry and homeless is for someone else. “Oh that’s what happens to the nameless masses in China or Tibet—or Indonesia or Sri Lanka. This stuff always happens to them—and not us.”
But I think that Jesus is telling us that when the End comes we will all know what it is like to have buildings falling on us. We will know what it is like to sleep in the streets or under viaducts or in gangways and under porches. Jesus is telling us that at the End we will know what it is like to have to go through dumpsters to find food or fight off rats who think we are food. Jesus is telling us that the end of the world will not be cool—but rather something we better be ready for. But He also wants us to know that all the physical mayhem and pain and agony that will be the hallmark of the end of the world is not all there will be. Jesus wants us to know that that is only the part of the whole Final.
Because Jesus intimates that the other part of the End of the World will actually be worse—because that will be the threat not to our bodies, but to our souls. The real End of the world is when we—precisely because we believe in Jesus— are arrested and harassed and hailed before the judges and courts and magistrates of the non-believers where we will be shamed and embarrassed and humiliated before the world—because of what we believe as Catholics. That is when the End of the World will get difficult.
Jesus is almost matter-of-fact about it. He says when the end comes, it will come with no small amount of persecution. And if we perdure in our belief in Jesus and continue our Catholic practices, there is no doubt—we will be thrown in jail—to await whatever the non-believers have in store for us.
They are already planning and plotting these things. Hate-speech prevention and anti-terrorism are the perfect legal cover for getting rid of those pesky Catholics and Christians. And the pressure will be tremendous. It is no secret that we have been duly warned by federal judges and senators that if we Catholics persist in protesting things like the killing of little children and the elderly, if we keep up the Catholic drumbeat against divorce and gay marriage—and perpetual war and evil banking practices, and then we Catholics will pay the price—And they won’t have to do much more than tax us in order to silence us.
And that is not even the most effective way they will use to persecute Catholics and believers in Jesus. The most effective way will be (and is) mockery—to laugh at believers and ridicule them—to make snide comments and structure a whole world of opinion and entertainment and news that belittles the followers of Christ and what they believe and how they practice.
No one ever likes to be laughed at. We don’t like for people to mock us and despise us. We have some idea of our worth and the value of our beliefs—and we like to be just as honored and loved as anyone, but when the whole world looks at us and sees no more than the man on the street corner with the chicken on his head—then you know how little regard the world has for us or our beliefs. And you wonder why do they hate us so?
All you said was that you may not take a life—you may not harm families—you may not impoverish already poor people— you may not wage unjust war—you may not defraud anyone—and somehow that is crazy? That is extremism? That is radical right-wing? Radical left-wing? That is over the edge and beyond the pale of modern discourse?
Excuse me—this is what we all used to believe before the atheists took over.
And such intentional misunderstanding does not have to only be about huge public policies—but can also be about how we live our family lives. The modern world thinks that we are extreme because we still hold to traditional beliefs—like Mass on Sunday—marriage in church—having children—and as many as God sends us—and faithfulness to our spouses.
And still the pressure mounts. It comes not just from the government and media but from our own families as well. How chilling are the words of Jesus: “You will be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death.”
That has to be the worst—when it seems that even our own family members have become shills for the New World Order. When our very brothers and sisters, children or parents seem to have become the pod-people of some bad movietrying to get us to shuffle along with them.
You find yourselves asking: how did your own family—that used to be so Catholic—become like the rest of them? And now they want you to approve of their surrender to the no-God of the modern world?
(Like when your children want you to fly to their “destination wedding”—so that—away from family and friends and village—they can get married on some anonymous beach by some anonymous judge. And if you don’t come you are a bad parent!)
Tell me that this pressure is not the very persecution that Jesus is talking about—when someone as close as your own children want you to do something that is wrong—and they cannot understand why you think there may be a problem with that!
How can we stand it when it is our own families—and not just atheists from New York—who are telling us to stop believing and get with the program. Finally, it is now members of our family who are proud to tell us how they have forsaken the faith of their ancestors for the pleasures and vapidity of this world. How horrible to see and hear that our own flesh and blood has gone over to the other side! And they are telling us that it is about time that we get with it!
For me—that is the point where it seems things could not get worse—when the mental suffering and self-doubt and temptation to give in becomes overwhelming. We start to say to ourselves, “Well maybe these people—even our family members—are right. Maybe this Catholic stuff and Jesus religion are delusions. Maybe the priests and popes are charlatans, and we better grab for all the gusto we can while we are still alive. Because there is no more than this.
And we think that if we do surrender to the world—just like the rest of them already have—then at least we won’t be tortured anymore by temptation. We too can join the march of the moral zombies. And we won’t have to worry about it anymore. We will be just like them.
So the End of the World will not be very cool—but pretty difficult—and pretty ugly—and full of suffering—and the major part of the suffering will not be from earthquakes and famines—but rather from the pressure to abandon Christ and His Church.