Friday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time [Year II]
Revelation 20:1-4,11—21:2  +  Luke 21:29-33

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

The last verse of today’s First Reading offers a key to understanding the entire Book of Revelation.  Mysterious as most of its imagery is, the image of “a bride adorned for her husband” is one that we readily understand.

The entire sentence where he describes this wedded couple is:  “I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride….”  This bride is the Church, and her husband is Christ.  This might seem odd, since it’s a city that is the bride.  But a city is a collection of persons joined together by several ties.  Here St. John is insisting that the most important tie is that of its members being wedded to the bridegroom.  St. John is describing the Church as a city, whereas St. Paul uses the metaphor of “the Body of Christ”.  As members of this heavenly Jerusalem, how can we reflect on our own participation in the Church?

We must think of this city as having a divine center, and ask whether our participation in the life of this city is oriented to this center, or whether instead we live in a little back alley of the city, focused on our own interests, apart from the needs of others and the will of the city’s “mayor”, Christ.

“The holy city” is the Church, the Bride of Christ.  But on this next-to-last day of the Church’s year, as her reflection focuses intently on the Second Coming, two facts about this city of Jerusalem especially stand out.  The first is the historical fact that the city’s savior and bridegroom was crucified outside the city.  The second is the spiritual fact that in the vision of the Beloved Disciple, this “new Jerusalem, [comes] down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride”.  This city is “prepared as a bride” as it comes “down out of heaven”.  That is to say, it’s God’s grace, and not man’s efforts, that make this bride what she is.  We need to disavow the falsehood of those who exhort:  “Let us build the city of God.”  This is the cry of Babel.  The cries of Heaven are cries of joy, that there, the last thing is the first thing, the Alpha and the Omega, the love which builds the city of God, washes away our sins, and makes us faithful citizens.

Thursday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 21:20-28

“Blessed are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb.”

Jesus issues a sharp challenge to you today.  His words might even be described as frightening.  Yet Jesus is not preaching fire and brimstone.  He’s not preaching, at least directly, about sin and damnation.  He is preaching, though, about the worldly desolation of Jerusalem, and signs above and upon earth that will cause people to “die in fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world”.

Many people find the idea of the end of the world very frightening, especially when it’s dramatized in literature or film.  The drama is enhanced by the physical destruction of worldly monuments and temples.  But physical destruction, no matter how vast the scale, pales in comparison to the destruction of a single human soul.

That phrase is not quite accurate, of course, because a soul can never be destroyed.  It would be more accurate to speak of “the destruction of a single human soul’s opportunity for eternal bliss”, or more simply, “the eternal damnation of a single human soul”.  Thanks be to God for His sending the Son of Man to redeem man from his sins.  This final truth is the reason for Jesus to speak hopefully at the end of today’s Gospel passage.  In effect, Jesus preaches that we need not fear the end of the world, or the end of earthly life, because when we place our faith in the Son of Man, we can have full assurance that our redemption is at hand.

Wednesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 21:12-19

“By your perseverance you will secure your lives.”

So many people grow fearful thinking about a cataclysmic end of the planet, even though the vast majority will never face it.  Perhaps you’ve seen one of those movies where there’s a dramatic end to life on the planet Earth as we know it.  Movies like that can draw a great deal of attention, and sell a lot of tickets.  Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter if you die from an ice age covering the whole continent, or from old age in your very own home.  What comes next is the same.

This is what we reflect on at the end of each Church year.  Each November, we pray to the saints in Heaven, and for the faithful in Purgatory, and the Church reminds us of the “last things”:  heaven, hell, death and judgment.  All this give us perspective.

In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus declares to His disciples, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.”  What does this mean?  Every day, God calls us to offer Him our lives in faith, and to live for others.  That’s how we can reach the hour of our death in God’s good graces.  In the end, C. S. Lewis once explained, there are two types of persons:  those who say:  “Heavenly Father, thy will be done”, and those to whom the Father will have to say, “My child, thy will be done.”

The First Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 2:1-5  +  Romans 13:11-14  +  Matthew 24:37-44

references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for today by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 668-677, 769: the final tribulation and Christ’s return in glory
CCC 451, 671, 1130, 1403, 2817: “Come, Lord Jesus!”
CCC 2729-2733: humble vigilance of heart

“For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”

“Mamma in her kerchief, and I in my cap, had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.”

There’s something extremely enjoyable about sleep.  The older we get, the more we appreciate something as simple as a nap.  If I were to paint a verbal picture for you of a Sunday afternoon in January, with snow falling outside and the fireplace roaring, with a feather pillow and one of Grandma’s quilts on the sofa, then if the idea of a long nap didn’t immediately appeal to you, you would have to be under the age of thirty.

Nonetheless, regardless of age, is there anyone who likes being woken from sleep?  I doubt there are many parents who like the chore of trying to wake a child.  Sleep is something we cling to.  Even if we can only have one more minute of sleep, and press the snooze button one more time …  We don’t want to leave our state of sleep.

Yet even as much as we prize our sleep, sleep is also used in our culture as a metaphor for very negative experiences.  If we say that someone’s “asleep at the wheel”, we’re not complimenting the person.  If an athlete is on the field or the court, and the coach yells at the athlete, “Wake up out there!”, you can assume that the coach is not happy with the athlete’s performance.

In those settings, “sleep” implies some sort of “disconnect”, while its opposite—wakefulness—implies being connected, being “plugged in”, being alert to and engaged in what’s going on around oneself.  The person who is asleep is not aware of what’s going on around him.  He cannot see the “big picture”.

Even more confusing is that these two opposite ways of using the metaphor of “sleep”—as something that is very enjoyable and comfortable, and also as something implying a disconnect in our lives—are not mutually exclusive.  That is, we often enjoy being disconnected from the bigger picture.  One of the reasons that we want to remain asleep is so that we won’t have to look at the big picture.

We hear about this double meaning of sleep within today’s Scriptures.  Focus upon Jesus’ command in the Gospel Reading.  What kind of sleep is Jesus talking about when he commands, “Therefore, stay awake!”?  In order to reach an answer, reflect upon different degrees to which one can or cannot awaken oneself.

First, there is the sort of sleep that you can wake yourself from directly.  For example, an athlete can monitor his stats, recognize when he’s sleeping out on the field or the court, and take concrete steps to wake himself from his slumber.

Second is the kind of sleep from which we can only wake ourselves indirectly.  An example would be the sleep that we settle into each night when we put our head on our pillow.  You can’t consciously rouse yourself from the middle of this sleep.  But you can wake yourself indirectly by setting an alarm clock before falling asleep.

Then there is a third type of sleep, from which we cannot wake ourselves at all.  The most obvious example of this is death:  human death.

In our moral and spiritual life, we have to face all three types of sleep.

First is the sleep of vice.  A vice is a bad moral habit that we choose to cultivate, but which we can also uproot if we so choose.  Moral effort by itself can alleviate vices, although God’s grace makes the process much easier.

Second is the sleep caused by sin.  Sin destroys grace within us, leading to a sort of spiritual sleep.  We can only uproot sin—both mortal and venial—indirectly, by turning to God to wake us up.  We can make restitution for our sins, but not atonement.

Third is the sleep of death.  Human death, unlike vices and sins, is irreversible (outside of a miracle).  Ordinarily, no human person can raise herself or himself from death.  Only Jesus, who declared, “I am the Resurrection and the Life”, can wake one from death.

To stay awake, then, is to wait for the coming of Christ with hope and assurance.  We trust that His advent will bring freedom from vice, atonement for sin, and a door leading through human death into a life greater than we can imagine here below.

Tuesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 21:5-11

“Teacher, when will this happen?”

Everything that’s built by human beings can be destroyed.  That’s why something like the Great Pyramids of Egypt are so awesome:  not simply because they are so colossal, but because they have—to an amazing extent—survived the ravages of time.  You can think of one of the large cities on the West Coast of our own country (Los Angeles, for example):  from the air, as you fly into the area, you can be filled with awe.  Yet an earthquake could destroy everything in the area in a matter of minutes.

In this last week of the Church’s liturgical year, we hear Jesus contrasting “today” with “tomorrow”.  The Jewish people took pride in the physical beauty of the Temple in Jerusalem, but Jesus is cautioning them to think also of that “tomorrow” when the Temple would be no more.  Perhaps such talk was blasphemy to some of the Jews.  Perhaps they simply thought Jesus was being irrelevant, since the people of Jesus’ day would have had good reason to think that the Temple would stand for thousands of years.  In fact, Jesus was simply being a realist.

The reality is that this world is meant by God to be temporary.  It is meant to pass away.  Yet we are tempted to think of the passing away of the world, or of ourselves from this world, as something tragic.  Instead, Jesus wants us to embrace it as the opportunity He offers us for everlasting life.

The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Zechariah 2:14-17 + Matthew 12:46-50

“For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Why did Sts. Joachim and Anne present Mary in the Temple?  We could give different correct reasons.  It would surely be true to say that Joachim and Anne, as God-fearing Jews, wished to abide by the Law.  It would likely be true to say that over the courses of their own lives, Joachim and Anne had grown to have an immense devotion to the Temple as the dwelling place of God amongst the Lord’s People, Israel.  As Joachim and Anne presented Mary there, many memories of previous pilgrimages to the Temple must have flooded their minds.

You might meditate on any or all of those true motives in Joachim and Anne’s hearts.  But if you only have time to meditate on one of their motives, I would suggest that you consider that Joachim and Anne presented Mary in the Lord’s Temple that day for the sake of Mary.  For the sake of Mary.

Faith, certainly, moved the hearts of Joachim and Anne that day:  faith in the Lord and His holy Law.  Hope, no doubt, moved the hearts of Joachim and Anne that day:  hope for Mary’s future as the Lord determined it for her.  But love!  Love filled the hearts of Joachim and Anne.  Love created the very person of Mary through an Immaculate Conception.  Love carried Mary to the Temple that day.  Love motivated Mary, some decade and a half later, to respond “Fiat!” to the message borne by Saint Gabriel.  Love is Who Mary conceived when she responded “Fiat!”

Saturday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 20:27-40

And they no longer dared to ask Him anything.

In today’s Gospel passage, Our Lord tries to make clear to the Sadducees the meaning of the Resurrection.  We too, however, even if we understand and believe in both the Resurrection of Our Lord and the promise of resurrection that God offers to all who die, perhaps may need to realize what type of claim the Resurrection makes upon us as Christians.

To believe in the Resurrection is to believe in the future fulfillment of God’s grace.  It is to understand that the suffering of the present is as nothing compared to the future glory to be revealed in Christ Jesus.  It is to guard in God’s name what has been entrusted to me until that final Day, which for each of us is the day of our death.

We never find Our Lord going into great detail about the nature of the afterlife.  There are two practical reasons for this.  First, the glory which will be the reward of God’s elect is too far beyond our earthly comprehension.  Second, our only hope for sharing in that glory is to persevere in running the race which God has set before us, to stir into flame the gift of God each of us first received at our baptism, a flame in which we are purified like gold in the furnace.

Friday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 19:45-48

“… but you have made it a den of thieves.”

The Temple was the holiest place in the entire world for Jews of Jesus’ day.  Catholics have a very different sense of God’s Presence in the world because of the abundance of God’s graciousness in the New Covenant.  But use your imagination to picture a world where every Catholic church in the world has been destroyed except one.  Every priest in the world except one has died.  There is only one tabernacle in the entire world, and only in that one place does Jesus dwell in the Most Blessed Sacrament.  In that world, how would Catholics approach that single tabernacle of the Most High?  That thought experiment helps us grasp somewhat the sacredness of the Temple for Jews of Jesus’ day.

In Jesus’ day, one of the obligations of a good Jew was to go to Jerusalem at the time of Passover, and to offer a sacrifice in the Temple.  Those who were wealthy offered an entire ox or sheep, while those with less means offered turtledoves.  So there grew up a very large market during the time around Passover, a system within which many abuses developed.

Jesus undoubtedly had people cheering for Him as He chastised the Jewish officials and money-makers.  But how many cheered for Him when the Jews asked for a sign from Jesus, and He replied, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”?  Probably some were baffled:  here He had purified the Temple, and now He wanted to destroy it?

For ourselves, Christ is the Temple, of which we are part through the Church.  We need to purify ourselves—in thought, word and deed; mind, spirit, and body—just as Jesus cleansed the Temple, so that right sacrifice might be offered there.

Thursday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Revelation 5:1-10  +  Luke 19:41-44

“Worthy are you to receive the scroll / and break open its seals ….”

Today’s passage from Revelation focuses on Jesus Christ.  Yet it also teaches us something important about His Bride, the Church.  The entire Book of Revelation is not only profoundly Christo-centric, but also centered on the Church, because the whole book has a spousal message.

In today’s passage we hear of “a scroll in the right hand of the one who sat on the throne”.  It’s fair to say that the one on the throne is God the Father, seated in His majesty.  The scroll is the Good News of His Son.  We might even say that this scroll is the Gospel.

But this scroll is sealed seven times over.  A mighty angel rhetorically asks, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”  The answer is the “lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David”.  These two metaphors represent Jesus Christ in regard to His earthly authority, suggesting that only Jesus Himself can authoritatively reveal Himself to others.

Then the Lamb who is slain is seen.  This image of Christ crucified shows us that it’s through the Cross that Jesus reveals who He is to others.  The Crucifixion of the Word made Flesh is the “glory” which St. John’s account of the Gospel builds up to.

The end of today’s passage speaks of those for whom the Lamb was slain.  We hear the Church’s leaders singing “a new hymn”, during which they cry out to the Lamb:  “with your Blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation.”  This is the universal Church who is the spouse of the Bridegroom who gave His life on Calvary.