Trust in God turns the flow of life from nomadic wandering to a purposeful pilgrimage
Posted on November 15th 2009 in Weekly messages
The release of the disaster film, 2012, neatly coincides with the Sunday and weekday readings about the end of the world. By all accounts the main symbols of evil, in the eyes of the Director, the White House and St Peter’s, are obliterated. Other religions and governments, through omission, fare better. Mass destruction and its avoidance, has been an abiding theme in disaster movies. Ten years ago Bruce Willis saved the planet from an asteroid, and before then Earthquake and the Towering Inferno threw up their celluloid heroes of the moment. Their religious counterpart to cosmic destruction is the shallow understanding of God’s destructive anger which makes the religious quest look both unattainable and unattractive.
A quieter reading of this Sunday’s Gospel would reveal a more subtle understanding. The world will, in the fullness of time, come to its end, which will be accompanied by strange and terrible sights. Yet Jesus tells His disciples that even the Son of Man is unaware of this final denouement. He refocuses their gaze onto the situation at hand, the events that would make up the last week of His life. Jesus says that all of what he has been speaking will have come about within the lifetime of the then generation. Far from being restricted to cosmic destruction, the end of the world takes place on the local and personal level. The Jewish world view of the disciples was shattered by the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and the descent of the Holy Spirit initiated a new and enduring form of relationship between God and Christian.
Throughout history, certain events shake the order of the world, the Sack of Rome in 410, the discovery of America in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in 1945 being examples. The same is true with regard to our own personal history. The death of a family member forever shatters a well-formed family pattern, which must now be reshaped after a period of mourning. The move of children from primary to secondary school is another landmark in family life. A whole set of family rituals have come to an end not to be repeated, once the youngest child has completed secondary transfer. Jesus alludes to the unsettling experience of these ever-changing worlds, with the reassurance that His Words will never pass away. Through all these changes in the circumstances of life, trust in God remains essential. It turns the flow of life from nomadic wandering to a purposeful pilgrimage.
The modern age, with its rejection of permanence and ties, favours the existence of the urban ‘nomad’, of seemingly purposeless wandering through relationships, jobs, houses, countries, all in search of some ultimate satisfaction. The pilgrim on the other hand accepts that the journey through life will involve successive changes in his or her smaller personal world, as intimated by Jesus in this Sunday’s readings, but who trusts that the purposes of God are being fulfilled in some mysterious way.
The trust that the Father places in each one of us to participate in His project of cosmic reconciliation is answered by our own commitment to Him. This commitment would be impossible unless Jesus accompanied us throughout our pilgrimage on earth. This is the particular and unique story that Christians have to tell about God. God is the Trinity so is both completely other, the origin and end of history, but also nearest to us. The combination of the end of the world with God’s closeness in the present, means that everything within creation, and within our own lives too, can be reconciled back to God. The circumstance in which this takes place is the drama of life, the actors visible and invisible.