The Time Has Come

Today we celebrate the 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Those weeks outside the four seasons of the Church year: Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.

This is the last numbered Sunday of the Liturgical Year.

The last green vestments we’ll see for a while.

Next Sunday is the 34^th and final Sunday, but we call it the Feast of Christ the King.

And the Sunday after that we begin a new year with the Advent Season.

So, the end is near.

The end of our liturgical year.

A year that traces through the birth, life, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.

A cycle that we repeat and relive each year.

And as we near the end of that year, nature points us to the end times.

We haven’t yet had much of the bone-chilling cold.

But we have the short days, the bare trees, the flowerless gardens.

The dead leaves swirling into heaps along the sidewalks and gutters and doorways.

And our Scripture also points us to the end times.

The end of the world as we know it, with the second coming of Jesus.

We hear of the signs of that second coming.

We all want to know when it will be.

We all want to be prepared for it.

Jesus has told us that no one except the Father knows when that will be.

But we wonder and ask anyway.

In our Gospel today, the people ask about the destruction of the temple.

And Jesus’ answer addresses both the end of the temple and the end of the world.

But the signs he tells them to look for are signs that we see in every generation.

Wars, famines, earthquakes, plagues, mighty signs from the sky.

One other sign he mentions has always intrigued me.

False prophets.

People publicly claiming to be Jesus in his second coming.

They say: I am he.  The time has come.

Surprising as it may be, those false prophets are always around.

Wikipedia lists more than a dozen out there today; some well known with many followers.

I’ve been doing an annual check on one of them for nearly ten years.

Jose’Luis De Jesus Miranda.

Jose’ was a preacher who began his notoriety by claiming to be The Man Christ Jesus.

Eventually expanding his claim, saying he’s both Christ and the Antichrist.

He travels around in a Cadillac Escalade with a posse and lots of bling.

He claims to have millions of followers in thirty countries.

Even if he exaggerates those numbers,

It’s a fact that he does have radio stations, multiple churches and many followers.

Every year I expect to see his fall, but it turns out that 2013 was a big year for Jose’.

His ex-wife reported on YouTube that he died this past August in a Texas hospital.

But in a September video, Jose’ himself says he’s back.

There’s a lot of buzz among his church officials and followers.

As they ask, Did he die?  Is he dead?  Is he alive again?

They debate this great mystery on their Internet sites.

They debate as if they couldn’t simply consult the official State of Texas death records.

Jose’ and other would-be-Christs and would-be prophets like to predict the end of the world.

They point to those same signs that we see in every generation.

They themselves, unwittingly, fulfill the sign of the false prophets.

They ignore the fact that Jesus told us no one can know the hour or the day of his return.

And that his return will be unmistakable.

As clear as lightning filling the sky from East to West.

Why do we even worry about the end of the world?

People have been waiting for it for the past 2,000 years.

And there’s no reason to think they won’t go on waiting for thousands more.

So, the probability that the end will come in our lifetime is pretty remote.

Maybe we’re enthralled by the enormous scope and finality of it.

Doomsday, a day of dread.

The end of the world; the end of time.

The day of reckoning; the great general judgment of all who have ever lived.

But that finality isn’t an ultimate end.

It’s the end of only one stage of humanity’s existence.

It’s also the start of the final stage; the eternal stage.

The day of reunion of soul and body.

A day we should look forward to with great joy and hope.

We’ll all be there on that day.

But the overwhelming odds are that we’ll have died long before.

We’ll have already, at the time of our death, faced our particular judgment and learned our fate.

So there’s the end time we really need to prepare for.

The day of our death and particular judgment.

Our last day of opportunity to exert any impact on our own eternal fate.

But we don’t know when that day is coming either.

We do know it won’t be a thousand years from now.

It will be relatively soon—in a few decades or years or months or minutes.

In two weeks we’ll have one of those landmark occasions for new beginnings, for renewal.

The start of a new Liturgical Year.

We can use those two weeks to reflect on how we did in reliving this last cycle.

This specially-designated Year of Faith.

Maybe there’s something more we’d like to accomplish before it ends.

Or maybe we can consider the things we hope to accomplish in the fast-approaching new year.

We’ll probably have many more opportunities in this life for renewal.

Every new day can be a fresh beginning,

But some day—some day neither we nor the false prophets can know—

That day’s opportunity will have been our last.

33rd  Sunday in Ordinary Time

Lk 21:5-19           Read this Scripture @usccb.org