Tempora Finis

Amici, Americani, Compatriotae,

The night before yesterday I returned from a business trip on the left coast of the United States. I was there for a little more than a week and had the opportunity to attend Mass at one of the local parishes in the area where I was staying. Obviously yesterday I returned to Mass at my hometown Parish. I may as well have stayed on the left coast given the message that issued forth from a substitute priest who admitted from the pulpit to being a product of the 1960s.

Now the Daily Scripture Readings for the 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time included Daniel 12:1-3 and Mark 13:24-32, both of which have an eschatological (or end-times) theme. The visiting priest started off his homily innocently enough, explaining that Fundamentalist Christians often take a literal view of almost all of Sacred Scripture without giving sufficient allowance to the fact that the Bible is actually a collection of many different books written by authors of varied experiences over millennia, and as such has literary genres that employ a wide variety of techniques such as parables, allegories, hyperboles, metaphors, similes, etc. He used the example of non-literal meaning by citing a typical sports news report on the television or internet that the Tigers slaughtered the Gamecocks. Would a reader a thousand years in the future assume that a pride of tigers actually slaughtered a flock of chickens in a sports arena? So this point is correct.

But then the priest went far afield when he claimed that Jesus own words that heaven and earth will pass away does not mean that earth will be destroyed because God loves the earth (and us) so much that He would never destroy it (and by extension punish us). This obviously is in direct conflict with what 2^nd Peter 3:10-13 states:

10 But the day of the Lord shall come as a thief, in which the heavens shall pass away with great violence, and the elements shall be melted with heat, and the earth and the works which are in it, shall be burnt up. 11 Seeing then that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness? 12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat? 13 But we look for new heavens and a new earth according to his promises, in which justice dwelleth.

And the priest ignored precisely what Revelation 21:1 states:

1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone, and the sea is now no more.

Now I do agree with the emphasis placed on Mark 13:32:

32 But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father.

The Lord could return today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year or a thousand years from now. No man knows. And any one of us could die tonight, making the timing of the Lord’s return a moot point as we enter our Particular Judgment. But the disregard given to the prophetic aspect of Christ’s own words was (while not surprising since it came from a priest of the 1960s), very disappointing and depressing. We can disagree about various interpretations of events described in Mark chapter 13 and its corollaries in the other two synoptic Gospels (Matthew 24 and Luke 21). For example, some parts of Jesus’ prophecy obviously were fulfilled when Roman General Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, but others remain yet to be fulfilled. This disagreement among modern commentators is why I default to what the Church Fathers wrote, in this case St. John Chrysostom who wrote about these things in Homilies 75, 76 and 77 on the Gospel of St. Matthew. I really wish that before priests begin to give a homily or sermon, they would at least read what the early Church Fathers said instead of “winging” it with post-Vatican II nonsense.