33rd Sunday Ordinary Time - Year B

The last few Sundays of each liturgical year invite our attention to the last things:  the end of the world, death and judgment, reward and retribution.  The intended purpose of this focus on the end time is to prepare us for the final reckoning and to make us more attentive to the ways of God here and now.  Still some of us engage in undue worry and speculation as to the exact time, place and circumstances of the end.

In 960, Bernard, a visionary in Germany, announced that the world would end on Good Friday in 992. A century later, an astronomer named John of Toledo calculated that a major calamity would destroy the earth in September of 1186.  A group of London astrologers speculated that the world would end by a flood in February 1524.  The German astrologer and mathematician Johannes Soeffler supported that view and specified the date of destruction by flood as February 20, 1524.  As a result, Count von Laggleheim ordered a three-story ark to be constructed for his family. When the rain began to fall on February 20, a panicky crowd trampled the Count to death while attempting to board his ark.  The world did not end.

Charles Long of Pasadena, California, wrote a 70,000- word tract outlining the details of the end of the world which was to happen at 5.33 p.m. on Sept. 21, 1945.  But nothing happened.  Even when the year 2000 turned us to a new millennium  people were readying for “TEOTWAWKI” or “The end of the world as we know it”.  It seems that we human beings have a propensity for end-of-the world prophecies even when these are disproved time and time again.  Let us learn the lesson given in today’s gospel, (Mk.13:24-32): “As for the exact day or hour of the end-time, no one knows it.”

Useless worry and speculation must give way to careful preparedness.  That preparedness, as is given in the first reading from Daniel (12:1-3), consists in living wisely and justly in all we are, in all we do.  That preparedness, according to Hebrews author (2nd reading, Heb.10:11-14,18), also consists in trusting the power of Jesus’ saving sacrifice to forgive sins and to sanctify sinners.  Victorious over sin and death, Jesus has gone on to God and to glory; there he waits to call us home at a time and in a place we do  not know.  No one knows.  Hope and trust must wipe out worry; faith and fortitude must blot out fear.  The attention that might have been given to the false predictors of the end must instead be given over to the words and wisdom of God.