Today’s readings; Malachi 3, 19-20; 2 Thessalonians 3, 7-12; Luke 21, 5-19.

Shallow religion can be deceptive. It is actually misleading, because it never leads one to connect with oneself. For the first Christians, the fall of Jerusalem, the Temple in ruins, and the utter refusal of the Christian message were strong enough experiences to make the words of Jesus about deception and persecution credible. As the gospels confirm, the first Christians identified Good Friday with the chaos and catastrophe Jesus was predicting.

As Christian believers, we may very often feel perplexed on where exactly our faith stands or falls. We believe in a God who is creator and who lovingly cares and sustains us all in our life journeys. At the same time, talk of the coming of God is always wrapped up in terrible and disaster talk.

In today’s first reading, Malachi, the last of the prophets, sounds furious, speaking of God’s day as the day of reckoning, a furnace that leaves “neither root nor stalk”. It’s the same language and tone of John the Baptist, the other prophet at the crossroad of the faith between Judaism and Christianity.

But, speaking of God’s return, does it really help to be alarmist, apocalyptic, and fear-inducing? Isn’t this effectively counter-productive, even though terror and armageddon movies seem to be so popular in the film industry? It seems that God’s judgment is becoming less and less of a deterrent for those who still claim to be believers, let alone for non-believers.

Jesus himself uses apocalyptic language not really to instill fear but rather to bring to our attention the passage we all need to go through from exteriority to interiority where faith and religion are concerned. Settling down is never warranted in our faith journeys. God Himself is very unsettling in the way He connects with us and in our struggles to connect with Him.

The Temple ruins were a tragedy for the Jews listening to Jesus. But the Temple had become too much of a security for the Jews. It localised God’s presence and was exclusive, something unacceptable to Jesus the prophet as depicted by Luke’s gospel.

The stability of institutions that once guaranteed protection to our savings as well as to our faith is no longer. We live today in the midst of too much insecurity, whether cosmic or political, economic or religious and cultural. All this should make us focus on questions of substance, concerning the stability we yearn for. We need stability inside, that stability that no longer comes from the institution of marriage or the family or even from institutionalised religion, but from wisdom sought and achieved.

The words of Meister Eckhart, coming from a radical monastic tradition, sound so real and true today: “People must be so empty of all things and all works, whether inward or outward, that they can become a proper home for God”. Too many unfortunately feel this emptiness today which, though, is not by choice but imposed and suffered. The emptiness of Eckhart makes us rich, whereas the other emptiness devoids our very life of sense and meaning.

In an age of anxiety it is easy to win followers from those who are overcome by a sense of defeat. Jesus is not this type of crowd puller. His words in today’s gospel may sound really threatening, but he is only being an eye-opener against deceptions that thrive in our culture and in our religions alike.

Jesus is not speaking about the secularisation of society we so very often dispute and argue about. Society undoubtedly may be in need of change of direction and conversion. But Jesus is speaking of the purification of religion and of our faith.

Peter Kreeft writes that when the road approaches the cliff edge, warning signs and maps are needed even more, and God provides them. These signs and maps are the wisdom that can make us take pre-emptive steps to make the emptiness and disorientation we experience an opportunity rather than a tragedy.