Sometimes there are stories in the newspapers about people who discover that they only have a short time to live - six months, or six weeks, maybe - and who immediately draw up a list of all the things they want to do while they still have time. It could be something like a luxurious world cruise, or bungee-jumping off Niagara Falls, if they're inclined to be adventurous.
Other people claim that if they only had a few months or weeks to live they would fill up the time with a lengthy self-indulgent spree: a huge wild party, or a string of wild parties, spending all their money, getting drunk all the time. Sometimes they have the idea that ordinary principled behaviour can be abandoned: they'll be dead soon and they won't be around to pay the price or face the consequences of selfish, immoral behaviour.
In terms of the weaknesses of human nature that way of thinking might be very understandable, but I always think myself that the attitude of Christians towards death - including towards their own imminent death - is meant to be a bit different from that.
If we believe that the main goal of life is to be united with God, now as much as in the future, then we're very conscious of the fact that the end of our life on earth, whenever it comes, is the moment of coming face to face with God, and the moment of God's judgement - not even especially in the sense of having to face God's wrath in the imagery of today's first reading, but in the sense of being examined about what our priorities in life have been, and about the extent to which we've loved and served God and our neighbour during the course of our life.
So in some ways you would like to think that Christian believers who discover that they only have a short time left to live wouldn't really alter their behaviour or their ambitions in any radical way. They would carry on with what they were doing anyway: praying, trying to draw close to God, trying to live the values of the Gospel.
In fact, if there were to be any change or re-ordering of priorities, it would surely be in the direction of making these aims more important and more immediate. Christians, approaching their death, ideally would have a sense of needing to prepare themselves quickly for meeting God, facing judgement and entering eternity, rather than thinking that they still had ten or twenty or thirty years left before they had to think about all that.
That's one of the purposes, I think, of the kind of apocalyptic passages of Scripture that we have in today's readings. These images of natural disaster and the breakdown of society and family relationships, are supposed to focus our minds on the transience of this life and everything connected with it; and they're supposed to encourage us to get ourselves ready for the next life, since - as Jesus was always saying - we never know the day or the hour when we'll find ourselves standing on the threshold of the next life.
This Sunday's readings also suggest to my mind that what's true for individual Christians is also true for the Christian community as a whole.
It's often said that the first small groups of Jesus' followers believed that the end of the world and the day of judgement were imminent; they expected it to happen in their own lifetimes. They looked around at the corruption and violence of society and they thought that things were building to up to a great catastrophic ending of history and God's final judgement of humanity.
But their response to the end of the world wasn't to adopt some radically different form of behaviour or some radically changed pattern of relationships with each other. Their attitude, reflected in St Paul's advice in today's second reading, was: "Keep Calm and Carry On".
Whether the world is going to end tomorrow, or in a million years, the shape of Christian life is the same: to draw close to God, to carry out Jesus' great commandment of love of God and love of neighbour, with everything that that implies, and to keep progressing along the path of Christian holiness.
Some religious people hold that the apocalyptic images and warnings conjured up by Christ are being realised in our own day: earthquakes, plagues, famines, social collapse, violence and persecution of the Church. They believe then that in our own time "the end is nigh".
But in many ways that's a misinterpretation of the purpose of these New Testament passages. These lines of Scripture don't necessarily apply to a particular moment in history. They describe events which happen all the time - perhaps not all at once, or in one place - but there has never been a period in history when there haven't been earthquakes and famines, moral decay of one kind or another, violence and persecution.
And the way that the Christian community is supposed to react to these happenings is to hold firm to its own beliefs and principles - to "endure" as Jesus says here - and to look on widespread moral anarchy as our "opportunity to bear witness" to the truth of the Gospel. I would add that that includes seeing ourselves, the Church community, as a kind of lifeboat, or a fleet of lifeboats, always ready to haul anyone else on board who's trying to escape from the general crisis and collapse.
So "keep calm and carry on". That's the conclusion I think we should draw for ourselves individually, and for the whole Church, from these colourful premonitions of the end times that we always reflect on at the close of the liturgical year.
No comments:
Post a Comment