I think I speak for many Catholics when I say that gospel readings like the one we just heard really aren’t our style. All this talk about end-time persecutions, and wars that mean the world is just about over. This sounds like the kind of talk we usually leave to what we think of as more fringe-y Christians who think the end of the world is coming very quickly, and they are often people who seem to want it sooner rather than later, because it’ll be so great to be proved right about the winners and losers.
But for the rest of us, we usually think something more like, I’ve got more urgent things in my life I’m trying to work out than something so far down the road I can’t possibly control. Do I really need to even have a position on the end of the world? And the answer to that question is yes, I’m afraid we do, although I think if you look again at this gospel reading, the position we need to have is not what you might imagine.
Let’s start with two things we don’t need to have a position on. When is all this going to happen? And I’m afraid that despite the urgency that Jesus is speaking with here, the fact is he wasn’t telling. He said we can’t know and won’t know. Above all, he said we shouldn’t waste time wondering, because the timing isn’t the point. So if you’re hoping to live to see it, it’s not impossible, but there are no promises.
And there’s a second question we don’t need to be able to answer: What’s it going to be like? Is it going to be a disaster movie, with amazing special effects, everything collapsing and on fire? Or is it going to be more sad and gradual and drawn out, maybe even something that we humans end up slowly bringing on ourselves? We don’t get to know that, either. All we know is that someday, there will be a time that this thing we experience as the world will be gone, and it will emerge as something new that we can’t even begin to imagine. So you might be curious, but I’m afraid satisfying our curiosity isn’t the point of this gospel either.
But here’s the third and most important question: How does Jesus want us to feel about whatever this end of the world turns out to be? And the answer that Jesus wants to be our answer is that we should be people who find the strength to embrace it, and maybe even look forward to it with a certain confidence. Despite this anxious-sounding reading, what Jesus is saying is that above all we should not be anxious. We’re supposed to see what is coming as the end of a long story that will ultimately make sense, a story that we are supposed to see without any anxiety, because at the end, there is a victory that will put an end to our losses.
This gospel passage was actually written for people who were already overcome by anxiety and a sense of loss. The Jews this gospel was speaking to had just survived the loss of the center of their religious life, because by the time this passage was written the temple in Jerusalem Jesus said would be torn down was gone just the way he said it would be, a pile of rubble that the Romans destroyed just to prove who was in charge. Every familiar surrounding, every sign of what they thought was God’s presence among them, the holy of holies, was torn down and scattered. And so even to people who had gone through that, Jesus’s message is, the bedrock of God’s relationship with us is still there, even though it may be hard to see and feel it the way we always did.
Humans don’t like endings. They make us anxious. They can make us angry. They can knock foundations out from under us that we have carefully built for ourselves. But with God the end is never quite the end. There is no ending that breaks God’s relationship with us.
Sometimes people say things about life that trivialize this just a little, that make it sound like the bad things that happen in life aren’t really so bad if you have a positive attitude. People say, “God never closes one door without opening another one.” I’m sure you know that’s not in the Bible, and the fact is, there are plenty of people in this world who have been laid low by a door closing, and the open door isn’t so easy to see. People also say that “God never gives us more than we can handle.” That isn’t in the Bible either, and plenty of people have way more in their lives than anyone should have to handle. The fact is, change is hard in life, endings are hard. The cross is real. We lose our health, we lose people we love, we lose a sense of where we belong, we lose a career or something else that gives us strength and an identity.
It’s easy to react to all this loss by withdrawing, trying to protect ourselves from more loss, or with anger at people it would be nice to blame for the change we can’t accept. Some of us never recover from something in our world that has come to an end, and we can spend the rest of their lives trying to bring it back, or losing ourselves in activities and addictions that don’t give life.
Jesus’s message is about the anxiety and sadness and anger that come with change, a temple lying in ruins, everything lost, and his message is the story of God’s relationship with us is not over despite whatever rubble we see surrounding us. Don’t give in to any way of living that is centered on fear or worry or anger, don’t imagine that endings, even painful ones, have the last word in our story. Instead what we can have from God, Jesus says, is a kind of strength that is hard to picture when life has laid us low. The strength doesn’t come from anger or resistance but from wisdom, the wisdom of knowing that God is with us even when things are collapsing around us, that the worst moments of our lives can also bring moments of closeness to God, and the hope that in the end, this story of suffering will be redeemed.
A great poet once said that hope is not the desire that everything in life is going to work out, because it doesn’t, but that in the end everything will make sense. It’s a hard thing to grab onto when something in our lives is coming to an end. But today, Jesus wants us to understand that end of the world, or the end of anything, is not the end of the story.