As we approach the end of our Church’s liturgical year, we hear Jesus talk about the end times in today’s Gospel from Luke. As Christians, we can be so tempted in putting our own interpretation on our Church’s teaching of the end times. Throughout history, there have been many different false prophets who have done this, who have been predicting when the end times were going to happen. You might remember the Left Behind books that were popular in the 1990s. There have been other novels and TV shows about end times events in which large numbers of people disappeared with an explanation. Then there was all the hysteria in the marking of the new millennium in the year 2000, when people were stockpiling food and water and predicting that all the computers were going to crash. Even though Jesus explicitly told us that we could not speculate as to when the end times would happen, many cannot resist the temptation.
So, in order to correctly interpret today’s message, we need to put our Gospel today into its proper context. This Gospel passage is part of Jesus’ teachings in the Temple. This Temple was destroyed 6 centuries before Jesus’ birth and then rebuilt. All of Jerusalem was in ruins and much of the population of Ancient Israel was sent into exile to Babylonia for 70 years. The Jews finally returned to their beloved city to rebuild the Temple, but the Temple never achieved its former glory. Under King Herod, during the days of Jesus, a rebuilding project was undertaken to expand the Temple. The people saw the Temple as the place where God resided. Indeed, if a Jew in Ancient Israel wanted to encounter God, he went to the Temple. Jesus had already had cleansed the Temple of the merchants and money changers by the time today’s Gospel takes place. Now, he predicts the destruction of the Temple, warning that its stonework and votive offerings will come tumbling down. To the proud people of Jerusalem, Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple was blasphemy and an insult to God - certainly God would not allow it. Yet, within 40 years of this prophecy, Jesus’ words would be mostly fulfilled, with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in the year 70 AD. By the time Luke’s Gospel was written, this had already occurred. The Christians of this time period had to decide: Now that the Temple and Jerusalem have been destroyed, now that we are going through a time of persecution, what is God calling us to do? Jesus assures his followers in the Gospel today, calling them to believe in his words in the face of persecutors and false prophets. This shows how we can use every circumstance for the glory of God and as an opportunity to be witnesses to Gospel message.
Rather than trying to predict the end times and trying to predict the future, perhaps we Christians need to be more concerned about how we live out the faith each day of our present times. It is in the everyday practice of our faith that we will be prepared and strengthen our relationship with Christ. I remember attending an International Stewardship conference in New Orleans several years ago, where the first workshop session I went to was entitled: Everyday Stewardship: Spirituality for the Ordinary, Everyday Person. The title alone intrigued me. First thing the speaker mentioned in the talk was our calling to walk with Jesus each day and to live our faith in the present moment, in the here and now. As modern Christians, we can often focus on the future, neglecting the present. We’re called to be mindful of our relationship with Jesus and mindful of our faith, seeking him out in the everyone moments in our lives. Perhaps the speaker of this talk received a Jesuit eduction either in high school or college, because this everyday spirituality concept echoes the Jesuit spiritual concept of finding God in all things, in the different moments of our lives. I think of how we can often put our faith into compartments, focusing it into what we do once a week when we go to Sunday mass. Mass is very, important, but we are called to infuse our faith in our daily lives in a more focused and mindful way.
Yes, this is a difficult, stern Gospel message for us to reflect upon today. At the heart of this Gospel message, we are called to trust: to trust in Jesus, to trust in our faith, and to trust that we will persevere. We are to place our hope and trust in the way that Jesus will accompany us through any trials and tribulations that come our way. We are not to wait for the end times to come in order to find the courage we need to be disciples of Christ: we are to learn from Christ’s wisdom and teaching as we journey in faith each day.
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