The End is Nigh
With everything that is going on in the world today you might think that the end is nigh. Every news report and weather forecast seems designed to make us all very frightened. But every age has had its wars and crises, and there have always been those who have claimed special knowledge about the end of the world or some coming disaster: mankind has always lived in the shadow of some uncertainty about what the future holds.
As we end one liturgical year and begin Advent once more, the Church has us turn our hearts and minds to the end-times. The Lord made a considerable number of predictions of the future in the Gospels, and many of them involve death and disaster. They fall roughly into two: predictions about the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, and predictions concerning the end of the world. Jerusalem and the temple were indeed to be destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans under Trajan, and not one stone stood upon another. Often, however, in the Gospels we find predictions of the end of Jerusalem and the Temple mixed up with predictions about the end of the world. Our Lord says that there will be many earthquakes, plagues, famines, wars: for these will inevitably occur. Almost every age of the world has experienced its ample share of these things. But maybe that’s exactly the point. The end of the world is always nigh.
Because it is not the end of this physical world — the earth, and all it contains — that should concern us, but our own end. From the standpoint of our own death, what will we regard as being the most important in our lives? Probably not our careers, or politics, or economics, or our bank accounts, or our carbon footprints, but probably our families, those we have loved, and how we have lived during the time given to us. And of course our own end will be in judgement, for we will have to render an account to our Creator. And that judgment will come down to the question — which we must be constantly asking ourselves — whether God and our neighbour have been the principal concerns of our life. Scripture constantly emphasises these questions. Remember Our Lord’s summary of the Law: You shall love the Lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself. Heaven and Earth will pass away, but his words shall not pass away.
Our consolation is, of course, that while war, disaster and death are inevitable, hell is not. We have the strength and consolation — and great hope — of our faith, with all the assistance that our faith gives us, to avoid the fate worse than war, disaster and death. As Christians we need to accept that assistance and use it regularly — the Mass and Holy Communion obviously, but also Confession, and prayer and fasting and penance and good works. That is how we ensure that God and our neighbour are our principal concerns, and our primary anxieties. If we are trying to live a good life, with the help of God’s grace, trying to help others and love others, and put right those things that are wrong in us and in the world, then we have no need to fear our own apocalypses, and the judgment of the one who loves us more than we could ever deserve. He is the one, as St Paul says, who does more for us than we can ask or even imagine. Or in his own words, the one who came not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world — and that means you and I — might be saved.