33rd Sunday 2025
Malachi 4:1-2a; 2Thess 3:7-12; Luke 21:5-19
The year is dying, and so are we. A fortnight from now, the Church will begin a new year with the First Sunday of Advent: you and I may not pop our clogs so soon, but then again we may. None of us is guaranteed to see tomorrow, let alone a new year, whether in the calendar of the Church or of the world.
Do you remember the Beatles’ song “When I’m 64”? More to the point, do you recall when you first heard it, when it seemed to you, and no doubt to the Beatles, to refer to some unimaginably distant date in the future? How does it strike you now, when for many of us, 64 is rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror.
At this time of year, the Church always reminds us, in the liturgy, that we are not built to last: we have built in obsolescence. Far from frightening us, though, this should encourage us. The prophet Malachi speaks of the Day of the Lord, which will bring the destruction of evil, but he then goes on to say “But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in its wings”. There will be an end to our lives in this world—indeed to the world itself—but we were created not for this world only, but for eternity. The Day of the Lord will be for us a new beginning, the fulfilment of what we were created and called to be.
St. Paul too reminds us of this, but reminds us too that we must prepare for that fulfilment by the way in which we live our lives in this world. The new translation neatly captures a pun which Paul makes: meden ergazomenous alla periergazomenous—“not busy at work but busybodies”. Nice one! Even if we are not as young as we were in the days of the Beatles, we still have our responsibilities as others have theirs. God’s call is still new for us every morning: it may be different in degree from the call which He gave us in the 1960s, but it is still a call to live and move and have our being in Him as it was then.
Our Lord too reminds us that nothing lasts. Today’s Gospel may strike us as confusing, because it is warning of two different endings. There will be the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the end of the order of things with which the Jewish people have been familiar; but this will be a preparation for the end of all things, which will happen who-knows-when?
Although the Temple was the focal point of the faith of the Jewish people, and seemed indestructible, it would be destroyed by the Romans in the course of the Jewish Revolt in AD 70, yet the people and the faith would survive. There would be, there is, and there will be, persecution of Christians, in which many will die, as so many Jews have died in persecutions through the ages, but the faith will survive.
What remains of the Jerusalem Temple today? Nothing but the Western, or Wailing, Wall. How much of our Christian heritage has been destroyed? Yet both Jews and Christians survive. As Jesus told His hearers, “The end will not be at once”.
Yet there will be an end. We hear of wars and tumults every day: earthquakes, famines, and pestilences are regular occurrences. Tsunamis, bush fires, destructive storms and floods, many of them the result of careless or selfish human activities, may be seen as “terrors and great signs from heaven”. They bring death and destruction to many, and they are reminders of our frailty and of the frailty of our world.
Amidst all of this, says Jesus, “not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance, you will gain your lives.” How can that be when, as He has already declared, “some of you will be put to death”?
Are there not two lives and two deaths? Our lives on earth will be ended by death, but we were created for eternal life. And as there is death of the body—temporal death—there is a possibility of death of the soul—eternal death. Our earthly lives must be lived in such a way, in faith, hope, and love, that we are spared the second death, and taken up into the second life. The signs of mortality among which we live—not least the death of the year—should remind us to live each day in the light of eternity, committed to the love of God and of our neighbour.
