Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 13:24-32

The Gospel of Mark was written about the year 70 A.D., probably in Rome.  The war between the Romans and the Jews, which occurred around this time, resulted in the destruction of the Jewish temple.  The people who first heard this gospel were probably Roman Christians of Jewish ancestry, along with a few gentiles.  During the period from about 200 years before Christ to 200 years after, there was a popular kind of literature called apocalypse, which means “uncovering”.  Most of the time apocalypses talked about the future, but were really referring to the present.  The last book of the Bible talks about the end of time, but much of it is a criticism of the Roman Empire.  The Book of Daniel seems to predict five kingdoms, each succeeding the other -- but was written during the time of the last kingdom, the broken up kingdom of Alexander the Great.  Today we hear Mark’s “little apocalypse” and if you are like me, you are left scratching your head.  Stars can’t fall from the sky.  Did Jesus really say that this generation would not pass away before all these terrible predictions happened? If he really meant what he said, then clearly he was wrong.  There aren’t any people left from that generation.  So what is going on here? 

If you were one of those people for whom Mark is writing, you would be really worried.  Back in Palestine the Jews were being defeated by the Romans, and the temple was destroyed.  If you were a member of what then was a form of Judaism in which people followed Christ but kept many of the same traditions, you would fear for your life.  You would be getting dirty looks from your fellow Romans. You would try to fade into the background when the soldiers marched by.  And you would wonder if you’d made the biggest mistake in your life when you joined up with the Christians.  We forget that we Christians were subject to antisemitism a long time ago -- just like those Jews who came to Holland to watch the soccer play-offs.  

And Mark’s gospel addresses these fears, especially here in this part of Jesus’ discourse.

First, the gospel reminds us that everything comes to an end, eventually, even the world itself.  You and I will come to an end.  My marriage will end -- one of us will die before the other in all likelihood.  When we think about this fact, that everything we know about in our world will end, the first reaction is a feeling of hopelessness, purposelessness, maybe even despair.  But the little apocalypse we just read promises that God, who created the world and declared it to be good, will in some way deal graciously with all these seeming endings.  After all, we believe he loves his creation so much that he chose to become part of it as Jesus of Nazareth.  He isn’t a God that waits for us to fail, then punishes us.  He is there to forgive us time and time again when we acknowledge our failings.  He gives us grace to try again.

A second message is that we need to be lightly attached to the institutions and structures of this world.  God wants us to be good citizens and work for the common good.  We just went through another presidential election and you would think from the rhetoric that during the next four years we would have either a Nazi or a communist (depending on which side you were on) not only ruling us, but destroying all that we hold dear about our country.  Both sides claimed that if their opponent got into office, this would be the last free election.  Someday that will happen.  We would not be the first country to go from freedom to a form of political slavery.  Every now and then we have to step back and ask, to what are we really attached?  Because only God is permanent, only God lasts forever.  

A third message is that we have to be awake, alert, ready at all times.  We need to see the hand of God working in the world.  Jesus told us, “Be alert, I have told you everything”.  And yet most of us go through life half asleep, not aware of all the amazing things God is doing to us, for us, around us all the time.  Jesus urges us, his disciples, to see that whenever everything is falling apart, that God is there, the Son of Man is coming, nothing will be lost.  He will gather and preserve all that God has given him -- that’s you and I. And Jesus assures us that we will pass through whatever terrible things happen to us, because his word and his promises will never pass away.  

Christ the King

 Christ the King

John 18:33-37

This is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, and next week we start over again, with Year C, where most of the gospel readings will be taken from Luke.  Pius XI made this feast a universal one in 1925, after world war I.  It seemed like a good enough idea that when Catholics and Protestants got together to develop the revised common lectionary, some Protestant denominations decided to  celebrate the feast as well.  It’s the only feast common to both groups to have been set up after the Protestant reformation.

But what is it all about?  We don’t have kings and even people who do don’t understand what a king is.  During the middle ages in Catholic Europe there was a remarkable movement from kings who held unlimited power and were often corrupt, to kings and queens who went out of their way to live their lives as they imagined Christ would.  So you have Stephen of Hungary, Louis of France, Henry of Bavaria.  You have Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Portugal, Hedwig of Poland -- and these are just a few of the remarkable rulers who achieved the title of saint.  And since that golden age the Church has tried in vain to influence subsequent kings and queens to imitate these saints, who in turn tried to imitate Christ the King.  But as the church's influence died out rulers relapsed into the old mold, where they were mostly dictators who considered themselves above the law -- the law of God as well as that of man.

So what made these individuals saints?  They listened to the gospel.  They heard Jesus say that if you wished to be great, you must become a servant.  They heard his parable of the sheep and the goats -- the idea that the Master will recognize his sheep by what they do for the least of their brothers.  And they knew that all men and women were called to follow Christ, so they encouraged missionaries, they set up dioceses, they built monasteries and on and on, all the while recognizing the Pope as the ultimate vicar of Christ on earth.

Many years ago when I was young I was invited to give a presentation in England.  Afterwards my wife and I boarded the flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. There we took a tour of the city.  The tour guide spent quite a bit of time talking about Saint Margaret.  Despite the fact that Scotland had become largely protestant since her time, she is still revered and remembered fondly.  Margaret was born into the English royal family -- her father was an heir to the throne.  Margaret wanted to be a nun, but through circumstances that almost seem miraculous, found herself encouraged by her confessor to marry Malcomb, who was then king of Scotland.  Scotland had been Christianized by Irish missionaries, but there was still a lot of the old pagan religion, and Malcomb’s kingship involved a loose rule over nearly independent dukes.

In addition to bearing eight children, three of whom would become saints in their own right, Margaret Christianized Malcomb into the kind of ruler she had seen in her time in Hungary under Saint Stephen.  The two of them would open the castle doors to the poor, and they would wait on them before they ate themselves.  Although he was illiterate, Malcolm and Margaret contemplated the scriptures that she read to him and put them into practice.  They built monasteries and  churches, and worked tirelessly to bring their subjects to Christ and unite the scattered christian communities under the pope.  It was said that Margaret, who was about four feet and ten inches tall, had a way about her that won over the men who ruled under Malcom, and gradually the kingdom became more homogenous and united.  The kingdom became an example to the rest of Europe, and acquired the nickname “Athens of the North”.  Margaret died six days after the news came to her that Malcomb and her oldest son had been killed in a battle with England over a border dispute.  She died with her eyes fixed on the crucifix.  We know a lot about her life because her confessor, who had been with her since she left England, wrote a little book about her.  It’s out of print, but I read an eighteenth century copy in the Catholic University’s rare book library.

You could read about the other royal saints who had heard the call of Jesus, that if you wanted to be great, you must become the servant of all.  

We still have rulers in democratic countries, who try to live lives compatible with the Gospel.  Former president Moon Jae in of South Korea comes to mind.  Hopefully there will be more.  But one thing we can learn from studying the lives of the royal saints is that becoming a saint is not limited to professional religious people, and that any legitimate vocation can be the means to holiness. On this feast of Christ the King, let us increase our efforts to submit to his rule.