33rd Sunday in Ordinary
November 15, 2015
- Nobody knows the future. “But as for that day or hour, nobody knows it.”
- Some think that this is a good thing. Others, they might like to know. It doesn’t matter! We do not know.
- How your exams will pan out and what university you might score is a current preoccupation for some.
- Health outcomes are more relevant to others.
- Anyway, we have been surprised in the past. I did not know I would be in China for so long; or that I would be in Europe for 10 years. It was all a surprise.
- What we do know is that change happens. Perhaps not as dramatic as the gospel describes – stars dimming and the sun darkened.
- Hopefully, more like the end of suffering; greater justice and respect for human and created life. But we do not know.
- Jesus promises an end to this world with much detail, except the dramatic images of falling stars and earthly upheaval, familiar to his listeners.
- But we scientifically educated people are unlikely to believe that this is how it will look, unless, of course, we are fundamentalists.
- However, I do think that we all know a sense of end!
- Even in our most tender, loving and intimate moments, strangeness and separation invade. Loving embraces do not last forever.
- Even in success, failure stalks and disappointment follows the most pleasing results in life.
- The poor know it as richness; the rich know it as the failure of riches.
- The healthy know it as delayed sickness; the sick know it as a cure from suffering.
- Nothing lasts forever. Simple as that.
- This includes the Church.
- That is why the Church changes and it must change.
- Pope Francis said it well last week: “We are not living an era of change but a change of era.”
- And: “Confronted by change in the church, it is not useful to look for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally……. Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions and doubts – but it is alive, knows being unsettled, enlivened,” said the Pope.
- “It has a face that is not rigid, it has a body that moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: it is called Jesus Christ.”
- This reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when told that young people are the future of the Church, replied “NO! Jesus Christ is the future of the Church.”
- We do not cope well with change, perhaps especially in the Church.
- I loved and respected the scholarly and holy Pope Emeritus (Benedict) but I felt no life. It was a medieval revival, beautiful, to be admired, but not of this time.
- I loved my parents but they were from another time – they were “out of their time”.
- And I wonder whether many of us are not “out of our time”. That happens to most of us, not all, we become yesterday!
- If I am to be a priest today I cannot stay, where I belong, in the past.
- We must listen carefully to the Pope: “We are not living an era of change but a change of era.” And we must believe that, what passes away, opens for us a new heaven and a new earth. We must believe that “My words will not pass away.”
- This is a hope that gives us the creative capacity to leave the Renaissance for the Reformation; to leave the dead to bury the dead; to die and rise again; new wine, new wine skins.
- To believe that the Lord shows us the way.