A SERMON FOR THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Taking a brief glance forward for
a moment to Christmas, let’s take a look at one of the best known Christmas carols,
“O Little Town of Bethlehem.” In this
beloved hymn, we sing that “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in
thee tonight.” Very often, we don’t
ponder enough on these words, but if we think about it, it’s a very true
statement that it is Christmas that makes sense of these very strong emotions
of hope and fear we experience not just at this time of year, but on every day
of every month of every year! We hope for
many things, and yet at the same time, there is so much to fear from a future that
is unknown and threatening. The birth of
the Son of God, our Redeemer, in that little town of Bethlehem restored the
hopes of a fallen world two thousand years ago, and they do so again, and time
and time again, on the anniversary of that Birth. It is Christmas also that dispels our fears
for a time, or at least puts them into perspective as we contemplate the huge
gift of Salvation that Christ’s Nativity brings us.
Moving back to today’s Gospel,
with our blessed Lord’s own description of the End Times and the woes that
accompany them, it is useful to remind ourselves of this Christmas carol and that
whole supernatural viewpoint it gives us of our Lord’s prophecy. The hopes and fears of all the years are
contained not just in Christmas.
Christ’s Redemption is not a single event that happened in Bethlehem,
but an act of love that comes from God himself, one that is divine and
therefore not contained with the confines of time, but which reaches out beyond
the creation and termination of our little world, out into the wonderful eternity
of heaven. In this context, what, we
should ask ourselves, is the true value of all those earthly hopes and fears?
Hope first of all is a Cardinal
Virtue, and we should not forget this. While
we may legitimately hope for many natural things—a nice home, a loving family,
good health, prosperity and so on—true supernatural hope is concerned with one
thing above all others, the hope that we will one day save our souls.
Fear, likewise, is not necessarily
a bad thing if we approach it in a similarly supernatural context. It’s true and quite normal that all those
good things we hope for, we likewise fear the loss of. How terrible it would be if our nice home is
wiped out by a tornado, or if our parents are not loving, our spouse is cruel,
or our children fall into bad company!
How afraid we would be if we’re told we have a terminal disease, or if
we lose our job and fall into poverty! These kinds of fear are part of our life and
not a terribly pleasant part at that! Whether
the fears are well founded or not, we’d like to think we’d be better off without
them. And maybe we’d be right!
Supernatural fear, on the other
hand, is a good thing. In fact, it’s
such a good thing that God gives it to us as one of his very special
gifts. Fear of the Lord is one of the Seven
Gifts of the Holy Ghost. What is fear of
the Lord? It’s not so much the fear of losing
our souls and going to hell. It’s the ‘filial’
or chaste fear whereby we revere God and avoid separating ourselves from him. We fear offending God because, as we say in
the Act of Contrition, “he is all-good and deserving of all our love.” Sinning and offending God is the only thing
we should really be afraid of. The
consequences for ourselves are unthinkable, but in reality, the worst consequence
of committing a sin is in the nails it drives into the hands and feet of the
Saviour who loves and gives us so much.
If we stay free from sin, we need
not fear damnation. Whatever else we
fear, no matter how much it may affect our lives, is ultimately of very little
value compared to our salvation. When we
read today’s Gospel from this point of view, the great tribulations that will
one day come are somehow less ominous, less menacing. We can now see beyond them to those glimmers
of hope our Lord gives us, that after the terrible astronomical events that shall
occur, something far more wonderful, something that will far outweigh these upheavals,
shall surely follow: “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give
her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens
shall be shaken” and then…? “and then shall appear the sign of the Son
of Man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall
see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” For many, this will indeed be a time to mourn:
their iniquities will finally catch up with them as they realize that, as the
angels gather the elect from the four winds, they are not being gathered up for
the harvest. Finally, the wheat shall be
separated from the cockle, and there shall indeed be weeping and the gnashing
of teeth.
For those who love God, however, it
will not be a time to mourn. We shall
endure our fear by virtue of our hope.
Indeed it is precisely this holy fear of the Lord that will allow us to have
hope; and with the coming of the Son of Man, our hope shall be fulfilled. Whether it be the actual end of the world or
merely the end of our own lives, we shall recognize the signs of the end and
prepare our souls to meet our Maker. Those
signs of the end are not just omens of the bad things to come. Our Lord tells us that, rather, when we shall
see all these things, we shall know that “summer is nigh”. Our life may pass away, yes, and even heaven
and earth shall pass away, but our souls shall not pass away. They shall abide with God forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment