We Hope Until The End

Last Sunday After Pentecost 2018

Extraordinary Form

Let’s listen to the words of St. Paul again, beginning a couple of verses earlier than you have in your missals:

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love which you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel 6 which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—so among yourselves, from the day you heard and understood the grace of God in truth, 7 as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf 8 and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

9 And so, from the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

In nomine Patris et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.

In this annual week of Thanksgiving, it is good for each of us to take stock of our year of grace. Next week we begin a new year of grace with the first Sunday of Advent, a time of penance and preparation for the solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord. So we are given St. Paul’s words of thanksgiving, written to the Christian community of Colossae. This was a town in Phrygia, what is now known as southwestern Turkey, and one that St. Paul does not seem to have visited. The disciple Epaphras evangelized the people there, and brought that news to Paul. That was the occasion for his writing this marvelous epistle to the Colossians.

Colossae, and indeed all of Asia Minor, was a place where multiple cultures collided, so they are very much like the United States, and San Antonio, today. They had been targeted by Jewish and Gnostic and Christian preachers. They venerated the Archangel Michael, who was supposed to have brought forth a miraculous spring there. There’s nothing wrong with asking for the intercession of angels. The Church has always recommended that in our battle with evil powers we have their help. But it appears that many of them were putting worship of the angels ahead of their worship of Our Lord. That is the sure way to breaking up a community, and ruining our work of evangelization. Our Lord, Jesus Christ, must be the central person in our preaching, the central person in our worship. So St. Paul asked the Colossians to change their understanding and their practice, and to center their lives on Our Lord. He pleaded with them to live in Christ, rooted and built up in Christ, established in faith, full of thanksgiving. Christ, as our gradual psalm says, has delivered us from the evil ones who afflicted us, and for that reason we give God glory and praise.

Our Gospel text today is the scariest of the prophesies in Matthew’s Gospel, and a great deal of ink has been spilled by its interpreters. We should first understand that the first part of this passage refers to the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple about forty years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus. When the Jews revolted against Rome about 67 AD, there were false Messiahs placing themselves at the head of the Jewish forces. They had early successes, but when the Roman generals Vespasian and Titus took control of Roman forces, the Jewish forces lost again and again until they were trapped behind the Jerusalem walls. And reading the chronicles of that siege will convince you that Our Lord truly knew the horrors that would accompany that final battle. His warnings were heeded by the Christian Jews, who fled across the Jordan before the siege took hold. It was truly a great tribulation. The surviving Jews were sold into slavery, and Vespasian used the money from the conquest of Jerusalem to build the Colosseum in Rome.

The Jewish revolutionaries had ignored the message of Our Lord, had rejected the message of the infant Church, and tried to bring about a messianic kingdom–a political kingdom–like the one in the times of David and Solomon. But the kingdom of God is not political. Our Lord is not a king in the same sense as the historical royalties of Europe. He does only good for those who accept Him as their Lord and King. His throne is His rude cross. His law is to love God completely and love our neighbor sacrificially.