Gospel according to Saint Mark 13:24-32

Jesus said to his disciples: “In those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
“And then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.

“Learn a lesson from the fig tree. When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near. In the same way, when you see these things happening, know that he is near, at the gates. Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

“But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

What does God do to comfort us?

Luis CASASUS President of the Idente Missionaries

Rome, November 17, 2024 | XXXIII Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dan 12: 1-3; Heb 10: 11-14.18; Mk 13: 24-32

 One of the worst phrases to say to a person who is in prolonged, excruciating pain, or who suddenly becomes weak, is: Don’t worry, you’ll be fine soon.

The problem is not the words, what happens is that they have to be accompanied by other signs, for example, the confident face of a doctor, or an analysis that gives hope about your health. Or perhaps the assurance that someone will remain by your side unconditionally, whether the situation improves or whether it will bring you to the end of your life, slowly or quickly.

This happened to the criminal who was crucified next to Jesus; when Christ saw the faith that the delinquent had in Him, He responded with a gesture of affection that we cannot imagine and assured him that He would continue to be with him (not that He would “remember him”) without limits, beyond death.

In today’s Gospel, Christ gives us the consolation of the eternity that awaits us, but He does not soften His words by announcing wars, earthquakes, tribulation and persecutions, as a prelude to the end of the world. More than one person, in these months of generalized world conflicts and natural catastrophes, wonders if all this is not a sign of what the Gospel announces.

It is useless to discuss this matter, for Christ adds that as for the day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father. This is something that may seem surprising (isn’t there supposed to be a perfect communication between Jesus Christ and the Father?), but our poor human logic does not put in first place the most important message of this sentence: We do not need to satisfy our curiosity, not even the most legitimate one, to be faithful to what we are discovering of the divine will for our personal life.

To this end, and to console us, Christ always sends the Spirit in a thousand ways to give strength to those who have faith. As he did with Perpetua and Felicity, a Roman noblewoman and her maidservant, martyred in Rome in the third century. Felicity cried out in pain while giving birth in prison. The jailer cruelly ridiculed her: If you feel pain now, how will you fare when they throw you to the wild beasts? Felicity replied: Then it will be different. He will be in me.

In the account of Perpetua’s death, it is said that she entered the arena of the coliseum as the true bride of Christ, shaming with her gaze all who looked at her. She addressed the procurator who presided over the tribunal: You judge us; God will judge you. Thrown to the lions and before being beheaded, they gave each other the Christian sign of peace.

—ooOoo—

In our case, if we probably do not need to be strengthened to be devoured by lions, for us, what are the signs that accompany Christ’s words, the promise he makes today to “gather his elect”? We could answer that God puts wisdom, strength and good intentions in our hearts, but the most intimate sign, the most convincing proof that allows us to taste something of the eternity that awaits us, is the intimate presence of the Divine Persons.

Some may think that this is something abstract, even illusory, but Christ himself expressed it in this way so that we would understand that it is something that is being fulfilled now; as today’s Gospel tells us: This generation will not pass away until all this happens. As many biblical scholars have suggested, Christ is speaking both of his final coming and of his permanent coming into our hearts, yesterday, today, forever.

This divine presence in us is so clear that even people who declare their atheism or their inability to reach God, have a way of praying that is sometimes paradoxical, such as insulting, or pleading “to a God they do not believe exists”. A famous example is the Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), who wrote a poem entitled The Atheist’s Prayer, in which he says:

I suffer at your cost, Non-existent God,

for if you were to exist

I would also exist in reality.

In fact, as it happened to St. Paul, the presence of God is so vigorous that it transforms itself into the true existence of the person: it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2: 20). His presence is so powerful that it overwhelms our convictions, our preferences and the power of our passions.

That is the liberation from sin. We are afraid and doubtful, we suffer temptation, we often fall… but at the same time we feel that if we refuse the life of service, the cross that Christ offers us, everything loses its meaning: the pain, the success, the joys, the effort… of this, sadly, we also experience when we are unfaithful and find ourselves, as the First Reading says, tasting something of what is ignominy and eternal contempt.

If we truly let ourselves be set on fire (what an accurate expression of Christ in Lk 12: 49!) we will feel the consolation we need and we will spread it to all. To be set on fire is much more than to be enlightened…

—ooOoo—

Returning to the brilliant Unamuno, in 1900 he published in the newspaper a short story entitled The Blindfold, a story about a woman who had been blind and, unexpectedly for everyone, is cured by a doctor in a remarkable intervention. But she refused to use her sight and covered her eyes with a blindfold, continuing to use a cane to walk the streets with unparalleled skill.

One day, she was told that her father was about to die and she rushed, always with her cane and blindfold, to her father’s home.

The family told her:

But don’t you want to see your father? For the first, perhaps the last time?

And she answered:

Because I want to see him… but my father… mine…, the one who nourished my darkness with kisses, because I want to see him, I do not take the blindfold off my eyes….

She did not need the information that her eyes could now provide; she knew her beloved father in another way, more intimate, more meaningful, as “the one who nourished her darkness with kisses”, the one who truly knew how to comfort her with his presence.

It is a story that reminds us how the disciple of Christ, the authentic aspirant to be an apostle, does not need ideal conditions or prodigious qualities to serve his neighbor; it is enough for him simply to feel that he is a son.

—ooOoo—

The image of the fig tree does not represent a fateful announcement, but just the opposite. Here we are not speaking of punishment or destruction. The farmer knows how to see in many signs the promise of a fruit, of an occasion that should not be wasted. It is an invitation to be prepared to reap the best that Nature has to give. In our case, the presence of God in our lives impels us – those who have much or little faith – to new works of mercy, to the only thing that truly changes the world, despite all the calamities that we cannot erase from our surroundings.

In this sense, we can understand the First Reading when it refers to the announcement of the arrival of the angel Michael. In the language of the Bible, “angels” were not always the pure spirits, the creatures that accompany God and have specific missions, including the accompaniment of human beings, as is the case of those we call guardian angels. For example, St. Michael was the name given to the guardian angel of Israel.

An angel is, in a broad sense, anyone who prepares the way and protects those who seek to serve God and the kingdom of heaven. That is why the Gospel of St. Mark speaks of St. John the Baptist as follows: I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way (Mk 1:2).

The signs that are represented in the fig tree are not only those that nature offers us, but especially the life of our neighbor. From every human being we have to learn something valuable for our spiritual path. Obviously, the lives of those we call saints bring us closer to Christ, as the Baptist did in an exemplary way. But those whom we contemplate doing some kind of good or committing mediocre, vulgar or depraved actions, also speak to us of God, confirming that we can become sensitive to his continuous call or, on the contrary, lose sensitivity to the divine voice.

This explains why, even the diabolical signs, those traces of the devil, who tries to focus our attention on our fragility and give absolute value to our difficulties, can have a not inconsiderable purifying value.

That is why, not as a simple irony, but because of its paradoxical usefulness in our spiritual life, the devil is sometimes called “angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), showing how certainly the divine plans cannot be threatened by the evil one.

Let us remember how the most important religions have perceived this struggle between some evil beings and the angels that God sends to help us. Today, it is not common to speak of the devil, probably because of a lack of knowledge of his true nature and his influence on our spiritual life. In our Christian world, artists of all times were not mistaken in representing precisely the archangel St. Michael, in many ways, as a warrior who puts an end to the devil.

Therefore, let us not read texts such as the First Reading and today’s Gospel with the arrogance and presumption that “that” is for other times. The world will pass away, but the words of God will not pass away, the Master reminds us today.

_______________________________

In the Sacred Hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph,

Luis CASASUS

President