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Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2022
Not unlike our attitude toward death, we tend avoid to avoid the topic of the end of the world by trivializing it. We don’t mind it in the plot of an action movie, or from someone standing on a bucket on some urban street corner, or from a politician reminding us that every election is set to be the end of democracy. (The American two-party system, at least, seems to thrive on the idea of ever-impending apocalypse.)
In our age of near-constant and universal anxiety, the trivialization and Hollywoodification of the end of the world is our way of avoiding the fact that the world really will end.
Whenever some big catastrophe happens, you can be sure that someone will start talking about the “end times.” Both Catholics and Protestants do this. The difference mainly seems to be that Protestants start trying to chart out the apocalypse according to Daniel and Revelation, whereas Catholics try to chart it out based on various private revelations. But what Christians today often forget is that the Church has been talking about the “end times” since A.D. 33, when humanity crucified the Son of God. Jesus’s death and resurrection was the beginning of the end, the sudden unveiling of God’s final purpose for his creation.
Things got serious again in A.D. 70 when the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed, just as Jesus, in today’s reading from Luke, said it would be. The temple was, for the Jews, the center of the universe: the place where God could reliably be found. Then it was all gone. And even the fact that Jewish Christians were able to make sense of this in light of Jesus—to see that he was forever after the true temple—did not relieve the trauma of the event.
From a biblical point of view, then, we have been living in the end times for the last 2,000 years.
Continued below.
Yes, We're in the End Times
Not unlike our attitude toward death, we tend avoid to avoid the topic of the end of the world by trivializing it. We don’t mind it in the plot of an action movie, or from someone standing on a bucket on some urban street corner, or from a politician reminding us that every election is set to be the end of democracy. (The American two-party system, at least, seems to thrive on the idea of ever-impending apocalypse.)
In our age of near-constant and universal anxiety, the trivialization and Hollywoodification of the end of the world is our way of avoiding the fact that the world really will end.
Whenever some big catastrophe happens, you can be sure that someone will start talking about the “end times.” Both Catholics and Protestants do this. The difference mainly seems to be that Protestants start trying to chart out the apocalypse according to Daniel and Revelation, whereas Catholics try to chart it out based on various private revelations. But what Christians today often forget is that the Church has been talking about the “end times” since A.D. 33, when humanity crucified the Son of God. Jesus’s death and resurrection was the beginning of the end, the sudden unveiling of God’s final purpose for his creation.
Things got serious again in A.D. 70 when the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed, just as Jesus, in today’s reading from Luke, said it would be. The temple was, for the Jews, the center of the universe: the place where God could reliably be found. Then it was all gone. And even the fact that Jewish Christians were able to make sense of this in light of Jesus—to see that he was forever after the true temple—did not relieve the trauma of the event.
From a biblical point of view, then, we have been living in the end times for the last 2,000 years.
Continued below.
Yes, We're in the End Times
