As days get short, dark, and cold this time of year, the readings for mass proclaim the end of time. It does not take any faith to see that the present order of human affairs is to certain doom and that everything we grasp for in life will pass away. Yet, something inside us rebels at the very thought. That instinct of self-preservation will not allow us to accept death or that fact that the world is passing away. Even a believer may struggle against the thought, the realization that all he has tried to do in life is nothing before the finality of the end An abyss opens up about whether life and one's identity has any meaning, whether anything about oneself actually counts. Some think that they solve this problem by believing in a world that does not exist - a future, just over the horizon. More often this fantasy rids itself of God and His judgment altogether - supposing that replacing this with something else will make for a better world. For all this, no matter how strong our belief in some sort of future utopia, doom haunts, goads and torments us. The weaker turn to diversions - pleasurable, relational, painful - anything to numb the cold, dark sense of foreboding. But, as long as we do not utterly dehumanize ourselves, it never really goes away.
Such is the world of the anti-Christ - the world beyond God, beyond judgment, where might makes right, where suffering has no meaning and thus, needs to be eliminated whatever the pharmaceutical cost. Technocrats blindly hang on to and promote this vain hope. Content to live in their own bubble, they shield themselves from the actual homeless, and confine their philanthropic efforts to solving quantifiable abstractions, numbers crunched in morbid cleverness rather than endpoints in eternity for whom the personal sacrifice of love is demanded. In the world of the anti-Christ, even the unborn are cast out of the one place that is meant to be their sanctuary. As long as there are others to sacrifice for the ideal, each can enjoy the fantasy of it in the shadows of a cellphone. But an aching vacuum within witnesses that all such evasivenss fails: what we grasp for grasps us until we fail to be efficient producers and consumers of goods. Then we too will be aborted with the firm hope that we will be too distracted or extinguished to care. The world of the anti-Christ never gets beyond self-absorbed presumption or despair before the mystery of death.
Our Christian faith offers a better way to deal this this terrible sense of foreboding before the finality of life and the cosmos. Christ does not take away the sense that all things are passing. He invites us to embrace this state of affairs with Him and to allow His own Holy Spirit to move us with a love that passes through the end of all things into a new beginning that will never end. Faith in Him teaches us the right kind of fear and reverence that we need for the end of our lives and the end of the world. He Himself renews our minds until we make of ourselves a living sacrifice and pure spiritual worship even at the moment of our death. With Him, every final moment becomes the greatest moment of our lives. To do this, He longs to purify and sanctify our foreboding. He longs to transform dread for the end of things into a true hope that we already possess in substance.
Having already suffered the full extent of human anxiety and having offered it to the Father on the Cross, He also has redeemed all of our concerns about the passing away of this world, and the passing away of our lives. He wants us to give these to Him. This takes trust. It takes courage. It requires joining our lives to His sacrifice with all the love and devotion of our hearts so that He can make of them something beautiful. This is the great work of faith - a true spiritual sacrifice.
By faith in Him, we join his mystical Body to reconstitute in His own love every form of fearfulness that opposes love. He frees fear from a despaired resignation and any other frantic self-inflicted injury to our integrity. He frees fear until it is "of the Lord" and the first step to wisdom. As members of His mystical Body, the whole mystery of redemption is renewed in our lives as we learn to live surrendered to His love fearing nothing save anything we might do that could separate us from Him. This means we allow the demands of love, that is the Will of the Father, to move us into action. Obedient to Love Himself and vulnerable to the plight of our brothers and sisters, we cannot be indifferent to the sacredness of life or ungrateful for the present moment that allows us to reveal the goodness of God in those places it seems most absent.
Jesus's second coming in glory is part of the plan of God for humanity. This eternal plan, what the Father has willed for us from the beginning, is born of wisdom and love -- and therefore it is fundamentally good for us. It is story of God's hope for us. In this story, a happy ending awaits us. We do not have to choose to live this story, but by grace, we can. Rather than increase our fears, Christ wants us to know with hope that the final judgment is nothing other than a sorting out of those who choose to live by the gift of grace. Those who do so, the Good Shepherd considers His own sheep. Those who choose otherwise, even if they cry out to Him, make themselves into goats. Our own grace imbued freedom hangs in the balance. Will we humbly cry out in trust and act in the the gift we have been given for the sake of others or will we cry out only for ourselves?
The grace of choosing to enter into this story of God's mercy or the decision to refuse the gift determines how the Just Judge will see us. Sheep or goat, we are on a journey to the Lord. On the Cross, Christ unveiled death not as the end of humanity, but instead as something humanity can pass through to a new fullness of life. To live with confidence in the final victory of good over evil, to live with confidence in the goodness of the Father and His plan for humanity, this is to follow the path of the Risen Lord who is the Judge of the Living and the Dead.
Christ's path of sacrificial love in the face of death sanctifies with hope the sadness and fear that we suffer in these short dark cold days. Dread becomes great expectation. Seeing with eyes no longer subject to death causes makes the heart yearn for what comes at the end of time. Those who see the last judgment in this way are eager to fill every passing moment of this short life with the love of God. This is how Christ lived his earthly life - aching for the fullness of love that is to come. By the pure gift that makes us members of His mystical Body, this is how He lives in us as Risen Lord until we meet Him as Just Judge - and to live by such an inestimable gift is nothing less than a path of hope.
He is the shepherd and we are the sheep. He is the Lamb of God and we follow Him whereeverHe goes knowing that it is always into the sheer goodness of the Father's blessing. If we permit ourselves, our hearts can ache with great expectation as the crucified God leads us through the Valley of Death to the decisive moment that realizes the definitive victory of good over evil. The victory, says Psalm23, is not exhausted in simply vanquishing those who oppose our progress on this journey. Rather, this victory has the form of a banquet, a feast, even a wedding parting. This is because, as is the case in a wedding, the victory is realized by a love that is stronger than death, a love that holds onto what does not pass away, a love that leads home.
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