THE HOPES AND FEARS OF ALL THE YEARS

 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.