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Sacred Scriptures/Liturgy- Commentary on Sunday's Readings |
ON THE END OF THE WORLD
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap, Pontifical Household Preacher
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
www.zenit.org
Daniel 12:1-3; Hebrews 10:11-14,
18; Mark 13:24-32
The Gospel of the second to last Sunday of the liturgical year is
the classic text on the end of the world. There has always been
someone who has taken it upon themselves to wave this page of the
Gospel in the face of their contemporaries and provoke psychosis and
fear. My advice is to be calm and to not let yourself be in the
least bit troubled by these visions of catastrophe.
Just read the last line of the same Gospel passage: "But of that day
or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son,
but only the Father." If neither the angels nor the Son (insofar as
he is man and not insofar as he is God) know the day or hour of the
end, is it possible that a member of some sect or some religious
fanatic would know and be authorized to announce it? In the Gospel
Jesus assures us of the fact of his return and the gathering his
chosen ones from the "four winds"; the when and the how of his
return (on the clouds between the darkening of the sun and the
falling of the stars) is part of the figurative language of the
literary genre of these discourses.
Another observation might help explain certain pages of the Gospel.
When we talk about the end of the world on the basis of the
understanding of time that we have today, we immediately think of
the absolute end of the world, after which there can be nothing but
eternity. But the Bible goes about its reasoning with relative and
historical categories more than with absolute and metaphysical ones.
Thus, when the Bible speaks of the end of the world, it intends
quite often the concrete world, that which in fact exists for and is
known by a certain group of people, their world. It is, in sum, the
end of a world that is being treated not the end of the world, even
if the two perspectives at times intertwine.
Jesus says: "This generation will not pass away until all these
things have taken place." Is he mistaken? No, it was the world that
was known to his hearers that passed away, the Jewish world. It
tragically passed away with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
When, in 410, the Vandals sacked Rome, many great figures of the
time thought that it was the end of the world. They were not all
that wrong; one world did end, the one created by Rome with its
empire. In this sense, those who, with the destruction of the twin
towers on September 11, 2001, thought of the end of the world, were
not mistaken ...
None of this diminishes the seriousness of the Christian charge but
only deepens it. It would be the greatest foolishness to console
oneself by saying that no one knows when the end of the world will
be and forgetting that, for any of us, it could be this very night.
For this reason Jesus concludes today's Gospel with the
recommendation that we "be vigilant because no one knows when the
exact moment will be."
We must, I think, completely change the attitude with which we
listen to these Gospels that speak of the end of the world and the
return of Christ. We must no longer regard as a punishment and a
veiled threat that which the Scriptures call "the blessed hope" of
Christians, that is, the return of our Lord Jesus Christ (Titus
2:13). The mistaken idea we have of God must be corrected. The
recurrent talk about the end of the world which is often engaged in
by those with a distorted religious sentiment, has a devastating
effect on many people. It reinforces the idea of a God who is always
angry, ready to vent his wrath on the world. But this is not the God
of the Bible which a psalm describes as "merciful and gracious, slow
to anger and abounding in steadfast love, who will not always accuse
or keep his anger forever ... because he knows that we are made of
dust" (Psalm 103:8-14).
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
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