WHO IS LIKE UNTO GOD?

A SERMON FOR THE 24TH AND LAST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Few Gospels pack a punch more than the one for this day, the Last Sunday after Pentecost.  The end of the world—it’s an idea that seems to grip us with dread and foreboding at the possibilities that lie ahead of us.  We have questions:  What will happen exactly?  What is the order of events leading up the world’s end?  How bad will it be?  And most importantly, it seems, when will it happen?  

Our Lord has answered some of these questions, but other aspects remain shrouded in mystery that we cannot hope to fully penetrate.  However, we can try to delve into these mysteries a little at a time, and see if they are applicable to the present time we live in.  After all, if the end of the world is just round the corner, it would be useful to know what’s coming so we might prepare.  

For example, are there any signs right now of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place?  From the sound of it, the end of the world will be triggered by this abomination of desolation—an act of human apostasy so great that our Blessed Mother will no longer be able to hold back the righteous hand of her Son.  Look around you.  Do you see any signs of such sinful depravity?  I’ll tell you what I see:  God is being removed by force from our way of life.  And he is being replaced by an idol, more tantalizing than any of the pagan gods of ancient times.  That idol is humanity—we are busy turning ourselves into our own idols.  Turn on your TVs and you will see, from the themes of the movies and shows, even from the advertisements, that we are being conditioned to worship ourselves.  The beginning and end of everything we do is no longer to be based on God but on ourselves and our fallen human nature.  We are no longer encouraged to love God above all things, and our neighbor as ourselves.  Today’s format is far more simple and enticing—that we should love ourselves above all things.

We sometimes wonder if such and such a person might be the Antichrist.  But in a certain sense, it is modern man who has become the Antichrist.  After all, who was Christ, but God made man?  So the reverse, the Anti-Christ, is surely the man who makes himself God.  

There is no question that the Church of Vatican II led the way in this act of desecration.  As goes the Church, so goes the world.  They have already placed the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, right at the very center of the holy place.

For Jews and Protestants, the place they envisage when they speak about the “holy place” is the ancient temple of Jerusalem.  For Catholics, it is wherever the Real Presence of our Lord is to be found in our tabernacles.  At the Crucifixion, the Jews rejected the presence of Christ dwelling amongst them.  At the Reformation, the Protestants rejected the Real Presence of Christ dwelling in the Holy Eucharist.  What both still fail to recognize is that the Old Covenant of Moses has been supplanted and replaced through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross and the Holy Mass.  Remember how the veil of the Holy of Holies was split asunder at the moment of our Lord’s death.  The old Holy of Holies yielded to the new and everlasting covenant, the Body and Blood of Christ, which was to dwell thenceforth in that new tabernacle of God with man, a new Holy of Holies, one that was to exist not just in a single temple in Jerusalem, but in all churches throughout the world.  

And so it was until Vatican II.  Suddenly, it became fashionable to remove the tabernacle from the High Altar, and, in keeping with the protestantization of the Church, to downplay the significance of the Real Presence, which was hidden away in some side chapel, no longer the center of focus the second you walked into a Catholic Church.  And then of course, they replaced the Mass itself.  The priest turned his back on God, and now faced the people.  The people would now become the new focus of worship.  Meanwhile, the continuation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, the Mass, was reduced to a mere gathering of the so-called people of God, where they would unite to celebrate their togetherness in a mockery of religious fervor.

They changed the language of the Mass, the rituals of the Mass, and the very nature of the Mass.  The only thing they didn’t change was the name “Mass”.  And apparently, just because it still has the same name, this was enough for people to swallow it.  But the changes in it are so substantial, that it is obviously not the same act of worship that Christ commanded should be done in his memory.  As any theologian will confirm, substantial changes of the form, matter or intention of a sacrament renders it invalid. or at least doubtfully valid.  And the Church teaches that if a sacrament is invalid or even doubtful, it must be avoided.  You must flee, in other words.  Flee to the mountains.  But most Catholics did not flee this abomination of desolation in our holy places.  Some even believe we’re better off, we can understand the new Mass, we can take part in it more actively, it’s more “relevant.”    The devil may be evil, but he is not stupid.  This was a devilishly simply plan, and Catholics fell for it—the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, right under their very noses, front and center in their churches.

You here today are to be congratulated for your correspondence to God’s grace and doing what he told you to do when this abomination of desolation would occur.  How exactly did our Lord tell us to react?  He says simply that we must flee.  “Let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains.”  And we fled.  We didn’t flee from Judaea, the location of the ancient temple of Zion, but from Rome, the new Holy City.  And we marvel how what was once worshiped as Christ’s Body under the form of bread and wine is now nothing but bread and wine under the pretense of being Christ’s Body.  We flee from those little pieces of white bread that desecrate the altars of our churches, and we flee from the little man in the white cassock who similarly desecrates the papacy and runs the whole show.

We flee without looking back.  Those who are on the housetops should not come down to take anything out of their house.  Those who are in the field should not return back to take their clothes.  Lot’s wife made the mistake of looking back on the burning city of Sodom, and was turned into a pillar of salt.  Our path is an upward path into the mountains, and one thing they say when you’re climbing a mountain is that the worst thing you can do is look down.  The result—loss of balance, and you fall.  Today may be the last Sunday of the Church’s year, but it’s not so much a day for looking back, but rather forward and upward.  Forward to a future in which our blessed Lord will judge the world by fire, a fire which, with God’s help, we shall avoid.  And upward into the merciful arms of our Saviour, who will reach down and scoop us up from the hands of our enemies below.  And as we flee ever forward and upward, let our cry be “Who is like unto God?”  For God knows, we aren’t.