In the newer, post-Conciliar calendar we are focused on the end times in the Feast of Christ the King. In the older, traditional calendar there is no special festal liturgy for this Sunday. This is a poignant way to point toward the seamless cycle of the Church’s representation of the mysteries of salvation.
We simultaneously long for the Second Coming of the Lord – that is what Advent is about, by the way, the Second Coming in glory and judgment – and we dread it.
Early Christians prayed with longing “Come! Lord, Come!” In later centuries the sense of longing was replaced with sober realization of what we will endure on the day of His Coming. They prayed turned toward the East whence they believed the Lord would return. They prayed in joyful dread, confident fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom.
Both of these attitudes can help us in our own day to be concerned with joyful dread, or joyful sobriety, sober joy, about the meeting we will have with the Lord when He comes.
The last day of your life is going to be an anticipation of the Second Coming. As Augustine wrote: Qualis in die isto quisque moritur, talis in die illo iudicabitur (ep. 199.2).
In death your life will be laid bare. In the Second Coming itself, the Lord will lay bare all things. That which we have endured in life with patient perseverance and sometime suffering shall be given explanations.
St. Augustine explained that the Lord’s judgments are obscure to us now, but later they will be made clear.
Justice in this life is imperfect. In the life to come it will be perfected.
All that which God has permitted to happen here and now, will be given reasons and explanations. We will finally see perfect justice even behind what now is hidden and challenging.
The Church’s year presents us anew with the unchanging mysteries of our salvation. But year year we are a little different and closer to the moment when the Lord’s hidden justice and judgments will be revealed.
Do not be content to leave yourself straying on your life’s path toward your judgment with the knowledge of your saving Faith as it was when you were fresh from catechism as a child.
Do not leave yourself cold on the this path without the warming effect of works of mercy.
Live in sober joy, or joyful sobriety about the state of your soul even as you follow your path toward the Coming Lord through our Holy Church’s mysterious years of waiting.
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A Beautiful reflection on Rorate Caeli:
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2011/11/reaching-end-of-liturgical-year-liturgy.html
I always try to preach the end times and the Second Coming of Christ for the first couple Sundays of Advent at least, and often someone has remarked that they had never heard that the season was related to these things.
In the newer, post-Conciliar calendar we are focused on the end times in the Feast of Christ the King. In the older, traditional calendar there is no special festal liturgy for this Sunday.
Though the EF Mass of this Last Sunday after Pentecost is itself quite “special”, with its prayers and readings also turning our attention to the second coming and the last judgment. This Sunday’s EF Gospel reading (which is said not to appear in the newer lectionary) is one of the more memorable and powerful ones of the year:
“When you shall see the abomination of desolation . . . . . For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even to the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. . . . . . And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened . . . . . and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven . . . . . and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty . . . . ” (Matthew 24: 15-25)
What is hardly taught is “Be perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” Even this summer, I heard a priest say that we are not called to perfection ,which is in contradiction to Jesus Christ Himself. We have been fed lies about being saints for too many years. It is really hard to be a saint and means intense suffering, which most of us try to avoid. It means thanking God for opportunities to suffer and be purified. This is real and is possible, even on a daily basis.
If we desire to be a saint, that means that God wants to work that perfection in us. But, many priests talk down to the laity, either teaching the lowest common denominator on merely avoiding mortal sin, and forgetting that the life of virtue according to Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, and many others, comes after the detachment to venial sin. We never hear this from the pulpit.
Only two priests in my entire life, both traditional Latin Mass priests, have ever taught this in the Confessional and from the pulpit. To meditate on the Second Coming is to meditate on our own particular judgment and our failures to respond to the grace to be holy, even as Our Heavenly Father is Holy.
As to sober joy, I like Therese of Lisieux’s reminder of “unfelt joy”. She experienced a joy, a peace, without the normal consolations so many of us expect. I love her distinction here, and remind myself that I have joy, in Christ, albeit unfelt.
Blessings upon you, Father Z., for this sober(ing) treatment.
It’s unfortunate that in more recent times the meaning of Christ the King has been diluted. It is integrally connected to Quas Primas and the Social Kingship of Christ— i.e., the advancement of society’s and the government’s recognition of Christ and His Church and Her rights. This is what Quas Primas and Christ the King is all about. All Catholics are called to advance the Social Kingship of Christ.
Mr. Edwards – the resource I checked about the NO lectionary (which is generally quite reliable) concurs that the section of the Gospel according to St. Matthew which you quoted is not read at Mass. I checked Sundays, major feasts and the weekdays of Advent, Lent, Easter and ordinary time. Perhaps prayer is in order that a future revision may rectify that omission, should there be sufficient time for such rectification, that is.
Thanks, Fr. Z, for this reflection. Joyful dread (or, punnily, grateful dread) is befitting, especially considering the things I’d really rather not see exposed at the general judgment for the pain they will cause others.
Thank you, Father Z, for teaching us these truths, which many of us do not hear at our churches.
Gregg: “Perhaps prayer is in order that a future revision may rectify that omission, should there be sufficient time for such rectification, that is.”
Despite blythe references to the scriptural breadth of the OF lectionary, it would take pretty thoroughgoing revision to recapture the dogmatic and moral depth of the EF readings. Because regular spot checking indicates that a typical “hard” Sunday reading in the EF missal–one dealing with sin and punishment, death and judgement–is likely either to be diluted by omission of the “hard” verses, or omitted entirely from the OF lectionary, or relegated to something like every other year on Thursday in the 23rd week of ordinary time. With the result that, whereas it is heard every year at EF Sunday Mass, it is never ever heard at OF Sunday Mass.
No, this is never heard in the homilies of the NO, but not much that is “muscularly Christian” is. I like the message of this feast because like many other people, I have experienced much in my life that seems to have no earthly explanation, save hardship. You do what you can, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. But, and this diverges from the popular modern version, sometimes doing not as well as I could have doesn’t relieve me of the necessity of trying to do better. There’s nothing antithetical to “being a human being” about that; it’s the very essence of being a human being.
This is the definition of Christian hope. Christian hope is what Advent is about.
Advent is the “countdown” preparing us for Christmas. The coming of the messiah, which we celebrate at Christmas, was the object of the ancient hope of the Jews; heaven with God is the object of Christian hope, the fulfillment of the ancient hope of the Jews, and the fulfillment of Christmas.
The best aspect of the OF is the lectionary. I usually attend the MEF, yet I miss the lectionary of the OF. The fours Gospels (and Luke-Acts is in my judgement really one work) each have differing perspectives and theologies, and the believer should be exposed to these differences, and preachers out to respect these differences.
If one wishes to use the pericope from Matthew to which Greg and Henry are referring, one may wish to consider that it, like Luke’s own use of the pericope, is taken, again in my judgement, from Mark 13, Our Lord’s sermon on Holy Tuesday evening. And, still in my judgement, Matthew and Luke have differences from Mark, suggesting differing theologies. Luke and likely Matthew wrote after a.D. 70, the year of the fall of Jerusalem. (Get a hold of Throckmorton’s Gospel Parallels and study the three Synoptics’ use of this sermon.) It seems to me that Luke’s version (Luke 21:5-33) makes a clear reference to the fall of Jerusalem in vv. 20 and 24, and thus his version would not be about the end of the world but about the end of Jerusalem and the replacement of Israel by the New Israel — one of Luke’s main themes. Matthew’s version (Matthew 24:1-26) follows pretty closely Mark’s version, except for omitting the Marcan ending (Mark:vv: 33-27), which Luke omits also. Both Luke and Matthew add on to the sermon and number of parables about the duties of a Christian servant when the Master/Bridegroom is away. These parables may come from another time in Our Lord’s ministry.
I hold to the view that Mark is written before a.D 70. Thus Mark 13 cannot be a reference to the fall of Jerusalem but to the Parousia itself.
The Solemnity of Christ the King emphasizes not the whole Parousia but what comes at the end of the Parousia: when Our Lord reigns as King of a new Heaven and a new Earth. The “social kingship of Christ” should not be confused with this, however valid that concept may be. And to correct another confusion, the opposite one: In the OF’s gospel for this Solemnity, Our Lord does not tell Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world”. He says “My Kingdom is not from this world. It will be in this world – this world transfigured – at the completion of the Parousia.
And because our Lord reigning as King in the completed Kingdom is the end of the End, to put at the end of the liturgical year this Solemnity make sense. It makes sense for another reason: Advent is the technical term in Latin for the formal arrival of a king into a city. (Paul Stephenson, Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor, 2009, p.309). The liturgical season that follows Christ the King reminds us that His coming at the End is his second coming.