Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

“But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” - Mark 13:32

Dear Friends,

This Sunday’s Gospel ends with the Lord’s mysterious utterance concerning the absolute hiddenness of the end of time, hidden not only to every creature, including the angels, but also hidden to the Son, to Jesus Himself. He utters these words after explaining 1) that He (“the Son of Man”) will return after the great tribulation; 2) that the signs of spring seen on the fig tree indicate that the winter of desolation is giving way to the summer of consolation; 3) that “this generation will not pass away” until all this happens; 4) and that everything will pass away “but my words will not pass away.”

Was He predicting the actual end of the world and his Second Coming? Was He referring to his own imminent death at the hands of the authorities?

Yes to both of the above, but not only: Jesus refers to the individual arc of every human life, each of which is alone worth more to God than the entire created universe. He refers to the moment of our earthly death and to every moment of ‘death’ in which we suffer some desolation, in which the world caves in on us, casting a dark shadow across our souls, our circumstances and our outlook.

In all these shadows, all these times of desolation, both the signs of new life in and around us and the words of Jesus, remaining with us, never leaving us, never “passing away” from us, are the proof and presence of his return to us both in the here and now and definitively at the end of time, because He never leaves us, never “passes away” from us. And nor will we “pass away until all this happens”, that is, in the arc of our lives He comes to us and returns to us over and over and over again, every day and in every moment until the end.

Only the Father knows “of that day or hour.” He wills it so in order that we don’t remain fixated on the circumstances of our lives but rather on the One who holds the circumstances of our lives in his hands and who guarantees us life beyond any circumstances and who in all circumstances returns to us and remains God-with-us, Emmanuel.

-Alan El Haj, SCV