33rd Sunday

33rd Sunday Ordinary
November 14, 2004

"We hear that some are conducting themselves among you in a disorderly way, by not keeping busy but minding the business of others." (2 Thessalonians 3: 7-12) "All that you see here--the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down...." (Luke 21: 5-19)
St. Paul warns about the problems caused by minding other people's business and neglecting our own. Jesus talks to his disciples about the final destiny of our world, cautioning them not to try to predict when or where it will occur, nor to prepare to defend themselves.
It seems that we have lived so long with Jesus' prediction about the "end of the world" that it no longer is the realistic future which so completely dominated the lives Christians and Jews of his time. Many of us over the centuries have completely ignored Jesus' admonitions to prepare only by living in trust and love of God and each other. Indeed, Jesus' comments about the Temple crumbling were taken later by his enemies as justification for his execution.
· We know that this world will end sooner or later. Perhaps when our sun runs out of fuel, expands to engulf earth, and collapses into a dark star, with nothing left of us but a little cosmic dust. This scenario gives us several million years yet to get it right. We could be clobbered by a large meteorite, as has happened many times in earth's history before we were here, and life as we know it extinguished within a few days. We humans could become the victims of our own technological cleverness, use up the very resources upon which we depend for survival, and make ourselves extinct, leaving the earth to more adaptable species (viruses, rats, starlings, cockroaches, etc.), assuming there is anything left to sustain life at all. There are signs that this is already be happening.
· Excluding cosmic events over which we have no control, maybe we have some part to play in how and when the end of the world occurs. The scriptures refer often to the passing nature of even the most enduring things of this life. The Temple was destroyed not very long after Jesus' death. What about the temple of earth itself? How long do we have before it is destroyed also? We could be looking up in the sky for signs when they are right "down" here in front of us.
· St. John suggested that Jesus' reference to the Temple was a metaphor for himself, and by extension for us, his community of the faithful. We still, like the Christians of St. Paul's time, use up an awful lot of precious energy observing the mistakes of others, defending ourselves against criticism and rejection, and bickering over conflicting political and religious ideologies. In doing so are we missing the bigger picture revealed to us again today? We may not have the luxury of wasting much more time before any decision to act together is taken out of our hands.