Today’s readings: Malachi 3, 19-20; 2 Thessalonians 3, 7-12; Luke 21, 5-19.
From his words in today’s Gospel Jesus can easily be labelled a prophet of doom. But he is not. Long before him Jeremiah had similarly foreseen the destruction of the Temple and the city.
It simply doesn’t make sense to speculate, as millenarians do, about the fulfilment of Jesus’ words in our world. We need to grasp the real significance of the words of the prophet Malachi and of Jesus in today’s readings.
It is not a question of us imagining the end of time or of the world. The first Christians whom Luke is addressing had already experienced catastrophe and delusion with the death of Jesus and then with the fall of Jerusalem. So the words of Jesus are only a warning against deception.
Malachi is apparently the last of the Old Testament prophets followed by 400 years of silence on the part of God. In his time, Malachi addressed mainly the people’s false sense of security, leading to neglect of God. The connecting between Malachi and Jesus is John the Baptist.
Both in Malachi and the Baptist, and also in Jesus there is a sense of urgency, a warning that “the day is coming” and that “the time will come” when the Temple will be destroyed. Jesus came to substitute the old religion and the old way of perceiving our relationship with the transcendent.
When the liturgical year draws to its end, the Scriptures focus on the return of Christ which, biblically and spiritually, should not sound as a cataclysmic event dressed up in mythological language. It is a return to be understood more in its existential significance, urging us all on our priorities, leaving no stone unturned in our personal lives, and warning about alienation.
In this day and age when we seem to be engaged in lost battles where certain issues are concerned and where the so-called common good of society seems to be at stake, the Gospel again proposes “the eloquence and wisdom that no one of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict”.
We seem to be at a point in time when the survival of Christianity itself seems to be put to question. Our culture has become secular in a way it has never been before.
We often ask ourselves how Christianity can still function as the creative power it once was. Religion has ceased altogether to integrate public life. And this generates in us the feeling of being lost.
To go back to today’s Gospel, it’s no use staring at the Temple and envying the good old days. This is what Jesus meant when he predicted that everything would be destroyed.
He was specifically referring to the Temple, the heart of the Jewish religion. But he also meant the spiritual upheaval we all go through personally. In certain circumstances it is no use trying to restore any religious visions of the past.
In the eyes of our contemporaries, including most believers, religion may not posess the clue to the utimate meaning of existence. The guarantee, Jesus warns, is in recovering the eloquence and the wisdom to make of all this an opportunity. As Peter Kreeft writes, “when the road approaches the cliff edge, warning signs and maps are needed more”.
We probably need to rebuild from within. The idea of a Christian society built on an indissoluble marriage between Church and State reduced Christianity to a mere ideology. That is no longer feasible and appropriate, if it ever was. Religious life essentially originates within the self; otherwise it’s something cultural.
If culturally speaking God’s voice seems buried or is being silenced, yet, as Cardinal Newman once said, “He is still here; He still whispers to us, He still makes sign to us”.
We may be led to believe that we’ve exhausted what we had to say to the world. But there is still a long way to go for Christianity to prove its meaningfulness as a vision.