HEAVEN AND EARTH SHALL PASS AWAY

A SERMON FOR THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, and as usual, before we say goodbye one more time to the cycle of events in the life of Our Lord and his Blessed Mother, we are hit, right between the eyes, with a strong reminder of what those events are basically all about.  It’s the reason why Christ was born, died and was buried, that man might be welcomed back to his original destiny, union with God for all eternity.  Our Lord reminds us today of man’s final end, both as an individual and as a species.  The end of each of us and the end of all of us.  My death and yours, and the end of the world.

So far, our focus has been on the death of the individual.  The whole month of November has been devoted to the Holy Souls in Purgatory, with the constant ringing in our ears of the solemn notes of the Dies Iraebeckoning us towards the sobering truth of our own mortality.  Today, we conclude this meditation with the even more frightening reality that one day, not only we as individuals shall come to our end, but with us the rest of mankind, and indeed all of creation.

The world began at one definite moment way back in the shadows of time.  In fact, that moment marked the beginning of time. And just as God created the heavens and the earth on that Sunday morning long ago, when light was brought forth out of nothing, to measure time and illuminate space, it is equally certain that everything that God has created will one day cease to be.

And just as the exact date of Creation is shrouded in mystery, so too it is “not given to us to know the day nor the hour” when it will all come tumbling down and all material things shall vanish into the nothing from which they were created. It may be next year or in ten thousand years, or it may be tomorrow.  But one day it will happen.  

There shall come a precise moment in the future when time will stop forever. When the ticking of every clock shall stop and the clock itself shall dissolve into nothing.  And then everything else before our eyes will grow blurry, fading into a misty unknown, as space joins time in coming to an end. The walls of the room will disappear, only to reveal a world of vanishing fields and trees, crumbling mountains and evaporating oceans.  Even the ground beneath our feet shall cease to exist, as the laws of nature, such as gravity or our need to breathe air, will no longer apply or function.

And where does that leave us?  According to St. Paul, it is then that “the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”  

It seems then that if we are not already dead when the world ends, we will not die, but simply be taken up to meet the coming Judge.  Death shall die, and be no more, as the new Jerusalem we spoke about last week appears in the heavens and both living and dead rise up to meet Christ and be judged by him, and to take their rightful place in eternity (wherever that may be!).  Elsewhere in his Epistles, St. Paul declares that “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”  And those who are alive at the Second Coming shall be death’s victors.

And by the way, this is not what the Protestants describe as the Rapture. The Rapture is one of those heretical doctrines that was invented by men who misinterpret Holy Scripture.  There shall be no Rapture.  It is not just the “saved” who will arise to meet Christ, but all living men.  For Christ shall come again in glory, not just to gather up a certain few out of the population, but as we say every Sunday in our Creed “he shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead.”  Every man who ever lived, including those who are still alive when he returns. The General Judgment of all mankind.

The word “Judgment” has an ominous ring to it, and indeed it is to be feared more than death itself, more even than the end of the world.  For death, after all, is nothing more than a portal, through which we pass in order to be judged.  And the end of the world is basically the same portal, although now it is all men, the quick and the dead, who must pass through it.  But judgment, that is something else entirely.  For although we must all submit to this judgment, every man who ever lived, the outcome of that judgment is not so certain.  It will take us to one place or another, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.  We’ve heard that expression so many times, “the stakes couldn’t be higher”, but really, can you think of anything where the stakes could possibly be higher for us than the result of our Judgment by Christ?

We must resolve to do literally whatever it takes, to ensure the good result of that judgment.  Think of the relief and joy we would experience if our Blessed Lord smiles upon us on that day and allows his angels to transport us into Paradise.  And then think of that sickening thud in the stomach as we are sentenced to an eternity of despair, with no light ever to shine at the end of that tunnel of misery that is hell.  I plead with you today to make whatever resolutions are needed to avoid the possibility that you could die, at any moment of any day, outside of the state of grace, to join the vast majority of mankind whose souls are damned forever.  Most of the time, such a possibility doesn’t bear thinking about.  But today we must think about it, and resolve to do what must be done.