The Real Day Of The Lord

Thirty-Third Sunday in Course 2022

The phrase “the day of the Lord” appears in the OT thirty-five times. But what does it mean? We’ve grown up thinking that the “Lord’s Day” is Sunday, because it’s the day of Christ’s Resurrection. Or maybe it’s the day of Christ’s return, a day nobody can fix on the calendar because only Our divine Father knows it. But the term is a lot more involved than either of those definitions approach.

The problem is that in years after the death of King David, the kingdom of Israel had fallen into apostasy. The Lord was to be the Israelite’s only God. That was the first commandment, and the greatest for them, as it is for us Christians. But the people around them–call them the culture–unlike today’s godless culture held a population worshiping lots and lots of gods, particularly the Baals and Astartes. They were fertility gods in an agricultural society, and their worship was full of sexual indulgence and particularly prostitution. Prostitutes as priestesses? Yes they were. People indulged in terrible practices and pretended it was prayer.

So the true God, seeing His people desert their commitment to His covenant, committing all kinds of offenses against both God and their neighbors, let them fall under the domination of foreign powers. They began to look toward a day of liberation in which God would intervene and destroy all their oppressors. That was called “the day of the Lord,” a day of joy and retribution and national pride. The false prophets made a really good living by preaching about that happy time.

But the true prophets, the seers of YHWH, like Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah, had nothing to do with that cult of optimism. They knew that the real problem with Israel, the root of the difficulty, was not political. The real problem was moral and religious, just like it is in America today. So the Day of the Lord they preached was, as Malachi said in our first reading, a day of intense, purifying fire, on which all the arrogant and evildoers, Jewish or pagan, would be burned up like dry straw in a field. The psalmist sings about that day because the good guys win big, and justice will be restored on the earth, but that process will always involve pain. In the end, the good guys see the sun of righteousness, the Son of God, rising with healing in His wings.

You may object, “but God is love. How can He burn up the evildoers?” Yes, God is our loving Father. He loves the good humans and the evil ones as well. He wants the best for each one of us, and the best is Himself, union with the Trinity. But evildoers know the rules, if only by their human reason. One does not need a stone tablet with Hebrew writing on it to know that it is evil to murder innocent human beings, born or unborn, young or old, disabled or abled. That’s written on our hearts and provable by simple logic and observation. If somebody doesn’t want to do what Our Lord commands, should He ignore that? Not if His justice is to be satisfied; not if He wants to maintain the moral order on earth. Punishment, at least separation of the good guys from the bad guys, is required for justice. It’s not loving to drag somebody kicking and screaming into the Beatific Vision. For the evildoers to be sent to hell because of their own choices is certainly tragic, but it is by no means unfair or unjust.

So Jesus is presented with the beautiful Jerusalem Temple, already decades under construction, an architectural marvel not to be finished for three more decades. It cost a king’s ransom. Was Jesus impressed? A couple of years earlier He had visited the Temple with His disciples, and was enraged that the Court of the Gentiles, supposed to be the place where all the nations would come to pray to the true God, had been turned into a marketplace. He cleaned it out to make it again a house of prayer. But it was empty of piety, profaned by Pharisees and Sadducees alike, beautiful on the outside but corrupt within. So He condemns it to destruction using the kind of hyperbolic language that would be unforgettable: “not one stone left upon a stone.” When the Temple was burned down by the Romans about thirty-seven years later, it had already been badly damaged by a one-year siege and the rebels’ use of its walls for fortification. The Christians, who were warned by the Master in this sermon, had left before the siege began, taking refuge across the Jordan River.

There are two other important teachings, though, in St. Luke’s account, and we need to keep them in mind as we speak with other Christians. First of all, Jesus refuses to estimate when either the Temple will be destroyed or Jesus would come again, this time in glory. He says there will be false prophets who would claim to be the returned Jesus, and they would all be liars. He says that others would claim to know the date of the last day. They, too, will all be liars. We’ve seen many such in the past couple of centuries, and many more in earlier centuries. There have been hundreds of wars and millions of rumors and unnumbered tumults. There have been millions of terrified people as a result. Before the return of Christ there will be more earthquakes and eruptions and terrors and maybe even asteroids. But before that comes we will see even worse persecutions than those under the Romans and Muslims and even the fascists and communists. What Jesus wants us to know is not when He will return, but that His Holy Spirit will be in us when we are arrested for our witness. He’s not telling us to remain ignorant of the issues and the Word of God, but He does tell us not to prepare an elevator speech for the encounter.