From the Heart of the Shepherd
- Church of St. Mark
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
From the bulletin for Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (2025 November 16)
Nov 15 - 33rd Sunday
The end is nigh.
Mirroring the maple trees on Wilder Street, the liturgical year now blossoms with an apocalyptic flourish as we approach the cycle’s end. Having started it with our Advent expectations and Yuletide rejoicings, then marching through our Lenten campaign of Christian soldiering and solemn Paschal celebrations, and now completing our admiration of Our Lord’s active ministry in the light of the Resurrection, we turn our attention forward to the fulfillment of all things.
With surprising frankness, the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes these eventually (and quickly!) coming events thus:
Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world. (CCC 675, 677)
Remarkable matter-of-factness! But these paragraphs are simply a terse synthesis of Holy Scripture’s statements on the subject, found primarily in Our Lord’s eschatological discourses, the letters of St. Paul (chiefly to the Thessalonians), those of St. John, and of course the Book of Revelation.
Every Christian generation has attempted to imagine how these realities might come to pass in their own day. On this very page during the last two summers, I indulged in such an exercise, projecting the second part of that “Adventure” into a distant future that did not seem vastly different from our present. Surely, in our times of shifting religious allegiances, the hyper-consolidation of money and information, and the emergence of artificial intelligence (with its unprecedented potential to control data and appearances), not much imagination is required. But as Our Lord tells His Church in the Gospel today, “Do not be deceived! “Do not be terrified!”
Those who “long for His appearing" (2 Tim 4:8) need not fear the Day of the Lord for “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). But that requires we embrace God’s plan, as its future unfolding is foretold in the Scriptures. “The kingdom will be fulfilled,” says the Catechism, “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil.” This, mysteriously, will involve the Church passing through a Passion and Death of its own, in imitation of its Master. A most assuredly an awful, frightening, and traumatic affair. But how could Holy Church wish for a more “glorious” end, given that “no disciple is superior to his master”?
By His death and resurrection, Jesus delivered all those who, through fear of death, were in bondage to the devil (Heb 2:15). St. Paul sings of this glorious liberty when he writes, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:35-39). As we liturgically rehearse the arrival of the Day of the Lord, let’s root ourselves firmly in our faith in Christ’s resurrection and join the Spirit and the Bride as they chant through the ages, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (cf. Rev 22:17).
Comments