A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for Sunday, November 14, 2010 | Carl E. Olson
Readings:
• Mal. 3:19-20a
• Psa. 98:5-6, 7-8, 9
• 2 Thess. 3:7-12
• Lk 21:5-19
By my highly unscientific estimation, the world has ended several hundred times in my lifetime, courtesy of nuclear war, overpopulation, famine, disease, global cooling, global warming, and so forth.
This is not to make light of those serious realities, to the extent that they are realities. But we can be tempted to interpret every sort of current event as a sign of world’s imminent demise. And, unfortunately, this can lead to all sorts of problems, including a misreading of certain passages of the Bible.
Today’s Gospel reading from Luke 21 is one such passage. This passage, along with Mark 13 and Matthew 24, are sometimes called “little apocalypses,” and have been subject to just about every sort of interpretation imaginable. C. S. Lewis was so distressed by the contents of these passages that he wrote, in the essay “The World’s Last Night,” that Jesus’ statement, “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all has taken place” (Lk 21:32) is “certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.” Lewis then argued (not very convincingly) that Jesus had indeed been ignorant in saying that world would end within forty years of His utterance.
Lewis’s perplexity is understandable, even if his attempt to solve the difficulty is not. A challenging feature of Luke 21 is that it records Jesus talking about three different events or realities: the persecution of Christians prior to the fall of the Temple in A.D. 70, the time of the fall of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Roman army, and the time of the Son of Man.
Although Jesus distinguished between these three events, He also presented them as being closely related to one another.
Jesus had, throughout His ministry, proclaimed that He was the true Prophet, the fulfillment of previous prophets’ statements and desires, and the savior of Israel. In today’s reading from the prophet Malachi, we are presented with a prophecy about “the day”—the day of liberation from the oppression and bondage endured at the hands of “the proud” and “the evildoers.” Many first-century Jews believed this liberation involved political and military revolution and would result in the overthrow of Roman rule. But Jesus went to great lengths to teach—often with parables—and to show—by signs and miracles—that His kingdom was being established to liberate the people from far worse sources of oppression: sin and death.
In Luke 21, Jesus prophesied that the Temple, one of the most impressive structures of the ancient world, would be torn down, stone by stone. Asked for a sign indicating the timing of this stunning event, Jesus exhorted His listeners to be both vigilant and wary against false preachers. He used the language of the Old Testament prophets to describe the sort of political and social upheaval that the early Christians would hear about and experience. These included persecution, for just as Jesus would be persecuted and killed (Lk 9:44; 18:32), many of his followers would undergo the same, described often by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (cf., Acts 4:3; 5:18; 8:3; 9:4).
The destruction of the Temple one generation from the death and Resurrection of Christ was a sign that the beginning of a new era in God’s work of salvation had begun. As the Catechism points out, Jesus “even identified himself with the Temple by presenting himself as God's definitive dwelling-place among men. Therefore his being put to bodily death presaged the destruction of the Temple, which would manifest the dawning of a new age in the history of salvation…” (par 586). That age, of course, is the age of the Church, which is the seed of the Kingdom.
The fulfillment of Jesus’ words demonstrated that He is a true prophet and that there is nothing to be embarrassed about. On the contrary, Luke 21—as challenging and complex as it is—proves once again the truthfulness of the promises of the Son of God.
(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the November 18, 2007, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
But we can be tempted to interpret every sort of current event as a sign of world’s imminent demise.
Nothing new to our own age either. I remember some years ago seeing the movie "Name of the Rose" based on Umberto Eco's novel. Despite the many prejudices and mythologies of the movie, in particular the attitude of Bernard Gui representing the Spanish Inquisition (by the way, what was Gui doing in northern Italy?) and the struggle of Sean Connery's character for Bacon's new scientific approach (the Church against science paradigm), Eco's book and the movie did capture a feeling and mood of the time, a sense of living in the end times.
There was a very serious expectation of the end of the world, given the conditions of the papacy ruling from Avignon and the apparent dichotomy between the opulence of the lives of the Churchmen and the austerity of the Franciscans.
But as Eco's story takes place in the 14th century we too must remember that there was widespread famine in Europe as the earth left the Medieval Warm Period. Add to this the Black Plague and the 100 years war and it was not surprising people thought they were living in the end times.
A number of years ago Colin Donovan and Desmond Birch did a series called the Last Things in Time and Eternity which is very thorough and puts the Catholic perspective of eschatology into focus alongside the myriad Protestant variations that seem to have found their way into pop culture and even the minds of many Catholics, not to mention some of the various claims by Catholics here and there to have had visions relating to end times. The series is still in the EWTN audio archive I think.
I think perhaps what C.S. Lewis was missing was the understanding of the Eucharist as the coming of Christ, as Scott Hahn regularly points out, and that lack colors his view of the prophecies of Jesus. Maranatha means not only "Come Lord Jesus" but can also mean "the Lord has Come." Cardinal Ratzinger has pointed this out as well I believe. It would seem to me that the harder prophecy from our Lord to understand would be that this generation would not pass away until the Son of Man returns. The other events, as you point out Carl, can be aligned with little trouble.
The Apocalypse of John is more obscure in places because it is John giving an account of what he saw from the Lord, rather than the direct prophetic words of Jesus. (Exception being the letters to the seven churches.) But it is easier to see that John's vision may well have encompassed a wider span of history, and that in symbols, so that John would not necessarily have the exact linear time-line. In fact, the Lord did not want him to know the day and the hour.
What Donovan and Birch do very well is summarize a number of marker events and conditions that we as Catholics can look for to know whether we are approaching the last days. When looked at rationally, I think we can say there are several conditions not yet met. How soon they will be, nobody can say, but it does help us to focus on the task at hand.
Perhaps that is one message the Church is giving us in today's readings by including St. Paul's admonition to some in Thessalonica to get off their duff and work for a living.
Posted by: LJ | Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 05:07 PM