We know Jesus was a great teacher, but in one area at least he left his disciples and the early church very confused. And it’s this nagging question about the end of the world, when it would happen, and exactly what would happen when it did.
That particular question is almost entirely off of our radar in real life today, because our view of the end of the world is entirely different from the one we heard in today’s gospel. For us, that end is something that’s so far off in the future it’s not worth planning for, it’s a misty future time when planetary forces we barely understand gradually turn out the lights. It’ll happen, but it’s an end, rather than a beginning. Or we think of the end as something that we might do to ourselves, if we manage someday to destroy our environment, a self-inflicted end to a beautiful run for planet earth. That could happen, too. But none of us tends to be thinking of the end of the world as the last act of a real drama, a drama in which God has the leading role, and when everything, absolutely everything, starts to fit together for the first time, everything makes sense, the ultimate happy and spectacular ending. We can’t picture it — and the language in gospels like today’s is foreign to us, they sound more like the ravings of a crazy sect obsessed with the end of the world, than like sensible Catholics who take everything much more calmly.
What was Jesus trying to tell people? Maybe the only place to start in readings with so many things difficult to picture, is with the one earthly and real thing in it: the Temple. Because today, Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. You have to remember: The only suitable parallel with the Temple in our experience would have to be something like St. Peter’s, in Rome: the center of our institutional life, a priceless work of art, the symbol of our history and success as a church. For Jesus too, it had been the center of his life: the same temple in which he was found when he was a boy, teaching, with everyone amazed at his answers, the same temple he just drove out the moneychangers from to protect its holiness, and here he is just before his own death, looking up at this building that has been his great destination, and telling the disciples that they will see the center of their faith, their St. Peter’s, lying in ruins.
And in fact they did: in the year 70, after a Jewish revolt that had no chance of success, this Temple was destroyed, more than a million Jews were killed by the Romans, more than 100,000 taken to Rome as prisoners.
Jesus had predicted this event, and what his words mean for us is that even today we will never quite get finished seeing things so terrible we thought we would never see them in this life. We will still see wars and earthquakes and destruction, he says, we see things that will confuse and discourage us and sometimes lay us flat with grief. We think they’re the end of the world. But they are not, he says, the end of the story. In the midst of all this discouragement and destruction, a fabulous and amazing end will surprise everyone. Some people will fear this end, but not those who have been looking for it. They will see what they have wanted all along.
Despite all the language of destruction, this gospel wants us to face the future with ultimate confidence. In fact, Jesus hopes that we will look forward to it. Because he sees future in the way this first reading from Malachi paints it: There’s going to come a time when we will see all the injustice and destruction in this world put right, where every grievance is settled, all the mess in the world is burned away. What we call heaven, after all, is not a faraway cloud land. The scriptures tell us that our future home is really going to be this world, completely transformed and recreated, started over. That’s what the end of world will bring us.
Do we really believe that? If we do, then it’s not a case of waiting down here for God to come do it all, but as Jesus says today, the surest sign that it is coming is what we see in the people who follow him: They will be out witnessing to their faith, suffering for his sake and for others, saying and doing things they didn’t know they could. And they do it because they know that all their risks are worth it, that it will all turn out in the end.
Do you think the future is something wonderful where we’re finally going to see the final making good of all these promises in the gospel? If we felt that way about the future, we’d spend a lot less time worrying about our own futures, our own private worlds we think we can control. We’d spend our lives instead with our eyes on that future that Jesus showed the disciples, a future where everything good we have ever done turns out to have been worth it, because it’s all part of one final triumph of goodness.
When will that happen? We don’t know. This end didn’t come when Malachi predicted it, and Jesus told us not to hold our breaths. But he also promised that we would not be disappointed, that this great ending is coming all the time, when people who follow Jesus take on the struggles of giving love to others in this world with complete confidence that love, in the end, is the thing that wins.