“Only, brethren, we charge you in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ to have nothing to do with any brother who lives a vagabond life, contrary to the tradition which we handed on; you do not need to be reminded how, on our visit, we set you an example to be imitated; we were no vagabonds ourselves. We would not even be indebted to you for our daily bread, we earned it in weariness and toil, working with our hands, night and day, so as not to be a burden to any of you; not that we are obliged to do so, but as a model for your own behaviour; you were to follow our example. The charge we gave you on our visit was that the man who refuses to work must be left to starve. And now we are told that there are those among you who live in idleness, neglecting their own business to mind other people’s. We charge all such, we appeal to them in the Lord Jesus Christ, to earn their bread by going on calmly with their work.”
Second letter of S. Paul to the Thessalonians, 3: 6-12 [link]
Oh dear, it’s the end of the liturgical year again, and the readings have gotten very extreme, as the Church begins to meditate on the Last Things. I shall remind you all in a few weeks time that the season of Advent marks not only the centuries of preparation among the Jews for the first coming of Christ, but also is to remind us to prepare likewise for His second coming.
How do we prepare? With prayer, certainly. With the Sacraments, of course. But just as important is to meditate on the commandments of God, the commentary on those commandments that Christ gives us in the Gospel, and the commentaries and catechisms that the bishops and priests since the time of the Apostles and S. Paul have provided us with. As Paul says to the Thessalonians in the second reading (above), they are to imitate a standard of living established by the Apostles and their cooperators, following a rule of life that they had established.
This is the origin of the teaching tradition of the Church, and her magisterium – her teaching authority. And all of these echo the first instructions given by God to the people through Moses: do good, avoid evil. You do good, you choose for yourself life. You do evil, you choose for yourself death. And this because the God of Justice cannot countenance evil and disorder. So, the prophet Malachi in the first reading gets lyrical when he tells us that the day of judgement is coming, which will bring evil to an end and will reward righteousness.
“Trust me, a day is coming that shall scorch like a furnace; stubble they shall be before it, says the Lord of hosts, all the proud, all the wrong-doers, caught and set alight, and neither root nor branch left them. But to you that honour My Name there shall be a sunrise of restoration, swift-winged, bearing redress; light-hearted as frisking calves at stall you shall go out to meet it, ay, and trample on your godless enemy, ashes, now, to be spurned under foot, on that day when the Lord of hosts declares Himself at last. Yours to keep the law ever in mind, statute and award I gave to assembled Israel through Moses, that was My servant.”
Prophecy of Malachias, 4: 1-4 [link]
The righteousness that honours God’s Name, as in this reading, is simply the Jewish understanding of thinking with the mind of God and so finding His approval. So, what are those four Last Things the Church has placed before us? They are Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. Death will find us all, for we are mortal beings. Christ’s promise of Life lies beyond death, intended for the Righteous who have managed to embrace the Law of God, and so have lived His spirit of Justice. How is righteousness determined? Through Judgement, and Christ has declared in the Gospel that He Himself will come as the Judge, bringing the recompense for the souls of the just ones.
That recompense is Heaven, which the Just have chosen for themselves by their lives of dedication, by their love for God and for neighbour. We really do choose our end, for God has given us that dignity, that free will to choose; our eternal end is not necessarily given us as a reward or a punishment. The greatest of the men and women of the Church whom we call Saints have loved not for reward, but for Love’s own sake. May we be like they were. For the last and most terrible of the Last Things is eternal death – Hell – final separation from the source of Life, Who is God. We creatures of time understand eternal as forever and ever, but Hell is simply being in a godless and remorseful state with no further opportunity to change this destiny.
Christ often tell us in the course of the gospel stories that we are to choose what is good and what is beautiful, and what will last beyond this world. He never means material things, beautiful though these may be, because we all know that no matter how beautiful anything of this world is today, that beauty may be gone tomorrow, next year, or in a few years time. Change and decay in all around I see, as the famous hymn goes. So, when the good disciples of Christ say to Him, Look at this wonderful Temple the Herods have built for us, aren’t these buildings wonderful, they’ll last forever, won’t they?, the Holy One looks at them with pity, for He knows that within forty years, the Romans would level the entire complex to the ground to quell the Jewish rebellions.
“There were some who spoke to Him of the Temple, of the noble masonry and the offerings which adorned it; to these He said, ‘The days will come when, of all this fabric you contemplate, not one stone will be left on another; it will all be thrown down.’ And they asked Him, ‘Master, when will this be? What sign will be given, when it is soon to be accomplished?’ ‘Take care,’ He said, ‘that you do not allow anyone to deceive you. Many will come making use of My Name; they will say, Here I am, the time is close at hand; do not turn aside after them. And when you hear of wars and revolts, do not be alarmed by it; such things must happen first, but the end will not come all at once.’ Then He told them, ‘Nation will rise in arms against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes in this region or that, and plagues and famines; and sights of terror and great portents from heaven. Before all this, men will be laying hands on you and persecuting you; they will give you up to the synagogues, and to prison, and drag you into the presence of kings and governors on My account; that will be your opportunity for making the truth known. Resolve, then, not to prepare your manner of answering beforehand; I will give you such eloquence and such wisdom as all your adversaries shall not be able to withstand, or to confute. You will be given up by parents and brethren and kinsmen and friends, and some of you will be put to death; all the world will be hating you because you bear My Name; and yet no hair of your head shall perish. It is by endurance that you will secure possession of your souls.“
Gospel of S. Luke, 21: 5-19 [link]
It will all go, He says, all of it, even the marvellous Temple. And in terror they ask, When!? But in reply He simply asks them to once more prioritise God, to prioritise Him. The things of this world can vanish in an instant, but God will remain. False teachers, false prophets, false christs will appear, but the Christians must fasten their hearts to Him. Secular governments will try to shake us away from Him with horrific persecution (and they are still about that today), but by the grace of God, hated though we are, we shall persevere, and Life, Heaven will be ours.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 