Friday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
I know that the popular take on scriptures like the ones for today's reading is the movie "Apocalypse," earthquakes, tsunamis and terrifying end-of-the-world events. Thinking about the end of time can be scary, partly because it makes us reflect on how much we don't know about our future. But when I meditated on it for this week, all I could think was, "This is just so true - this is the way life is." Life changes quickly - perhaps even moreso in these days of lots of technology. The world changes so fast - healthy people get sick suddenly; economic fortunes come and go; jobs and policies and procedures change. In our day-to-day life, unexpected things happen and we realize, over and over, just how little control we have over our lives and how little we really know about our future.
Today's gospel reading (Luke 21:29-33) hints at just such a rapidly changing world over which we have little control. In the versus just preceding today's, Jesus mentions how frightened people will be of the end of time and he says that when we see these things, we will know that the kingdom of God is near. But Jesus also says that "this generation" will not pass away until the new heaven and earth come. How are Christians to interpret this? The first generation of Christians thought Jesus' second coming was imminent; today, two thousand years later, we have less of that sense of imminence. Does this mean that Jesus' words are not true? Or that perhaps something else is being stated here?
I think the last verse of the gospel, about how Jesus' words will not pass away, is key to understanding this passage. The world since Jesus' own day has indeed, "passed away." Things have changed, irrevocably, and part of the reason they have changed is exactly because of Jesus' presence in the world. He has brought us a new heaven and a new earth, even though we cannot necessarily see evidence of it in our own rapidly changing world. In the midst of all this change, what we hold on to is that God does not change and that God is acting in our lives, even in ways we cannot necessarily understand or see now. Our faithfulness and God's faithfulness to us, despite all the changes in our lives, become the mark of the new heaven and earth.
The first reading (Revelation 20:1-4, 11-21:2) reinforces the importance of having faith. John specifically refers to "those who have been beheaded" because these are the martyrs, the witnesses to the faith who died rather than betray Christ. Death was not the kind of life change these witnesses of Christ worried about; they worried instead about change in faith, a loss of belief. That is the real change that has an effect on us. Ironically, the fact that the world constantly changes is the one thing that doesn't change about the world - and so our response to all those changes, good and bad, is to be unwavering witnesses to Christ ourselves.
In this world, which is actually so like the vastly, quickly changing end of time that today's scriptures reflect, the good news for us is that God doesn't change and therefore, we have something we can put our faith in.
- Jana M. Bennett