We arrive this Sunday at the very end of the liturgical year, and next Sunday will be the First Sunday of Advent, which will begin the new liturgical year. This Sunday and the next share the same words of Our Lord concerning His Second coming.

The prophecies which we read in the Bible are often very difficult to understand. Their language is seemingly obscure, written in a style that is very different from what we read from day to day. The reason for this is that the prophecies give to us that what God sees.

A prophet, in the general sense of the term, is someone who speaks the things of God. In general, He speaks of the things that God has decreed or what God has revealed. Yet, as anyone can say that 'God has told me this', God often works by the hands of the prophets miracles in order to give us assurance of the authenticity of their message. Such was the case of Elias, who even raised men from the dead in order to prove his divine mission. Our Lord also performed signs and miracles in order to prove that He was sent from God, as He said once to the Pharisees : "That you might believe that the Son of Man hath power to forgive sins, I say to three young man, arise."

Men may work marvelous things, but only God can know the future. Thus one of the most potent proofs of a divine mission is the foretelling of the future. This we see often in the life of the great prophets, such as Daniel foretelling the King of Babylon the succession of the world's empires revealing the dream of the King and its interpretation at the same time.

Nonetheless these prophecies are often obscure to us, such as the words spoken by Our Lord in the Gospel of these two Sundays. Many Fathers of the Church interpret these words as being fulfilled during the seige of Jerusalem in the year 70, when the Romans destroyed the city of Jerusalem. Others interpret these events a only being fulfilled at the end of time, when Our Lord will come again. Even others interpret these words in a symbolic manner, as referring to the destruction of grace in the soul.

We are created in the image of God, my dear friends, and so we have the capacity to know and to love just like God knows and loves. However, there is an enormous, infinite difference between ourselves and God. God is eternal, unchanging, immutable. We however are changing continuously through time. Even our language expresses this. We speak of things present, using the present tense of the verb to speak of things that are around us at the moment. For the things past, our speach changes to reflect not only the fact that the event has already taken place, but even concerning how distant in the past and the manner of its duration. For the future, for the things that we plan to do or should do, we also modify our speech in order to reflect the contingent reality. However, God does not live in time. For Him, there is no past or future, only the eternal present. The past and the future and the present are all completely known to Him in that one eternal gaze of His omnipotent mind. For Him the future is as clear as the present, whereas for us the future is never certain except in so far as we understand the laws of God or in so far as it is revealed to us by Him.

God gives to the prophets a participation in His very own knowledge, the knowledge of eternity, which is above all time. Thus the prophetic vision is often very obscure even to the prophets themselves, as they receive a knowledge that surpasses their natural capacities. They are in a sense overwhelmed by the all encompassing knowledge of God which surpasses all time and space. When they set down to write what they have received, they can often only do so by using images and analogies and metaphors to try to convey to us what they know of the future and what they know of God. Also the great mystics, such as St. Theresa of Avila, use analogies to transmit the ineffable states of prayer that she experienced. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest philosopher amongst the mystics, could only say at the end of his life that all that he had written was as straw when compared to what he had seen, that is compared to the revelation that had been given to him. In like manner we see Our Lord speaking to us throughout the gospel in parables of the kingdom of heaven, comparing it to a mustard seed, or to leaven put into meal, or as a net cast into the sea. These are all images that give to us a knowledge of the kingdom of heaven which is not only the Church, but also His grace and His doctrine, as well as its fulfillment in eternity.

Thus when Our Lord says 'this generation shall not pass till all these things come to be, we must understand this in the same way that God understands it. This sentence applies to the past, the present and the future, each in its own proper sense. It applies to the past, in the sense that the people, the generation that lived at his time, were the same people to suffer the destruction of their city. It applies to the present, in the sense that the abomination of desolation that establishes itself in the temple of the soul is mortal sin, which brings us to eternal ruin. This is the spiritual generation. As to the future, it applies to Our Lord's Second Coming, when He will judge the living and the dead, when the Church militant will be tranformed into the Church Triumphant, when the generation of souls on this earth will make their passage into eternity, into a new heaven and a new earth.

Thus we should not presume to judge, my dear faithful, on whether the end of time is near. The very first Christians, those who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem, were tempted to think that the coming of Our Lord was imminent. St. Paul even had to remonstrate the Christians in Thessalonica, as not to believe that the coming of the Lord was for their time. Nonetheless he repeated to them "The Lord is nigh", that is to say for each of us, we have only a few years before the world is over for us.

And so, my dear faithful, let us do as Our Lord says: "watch". Let us watch especially over our souls, that this abomination of desolation not enter our souls: let us avoid mortal sin with our all strength, watching in prayer and vigilance over our actions. Let us have always before our eyes the day when Our Lord will take us from this world, when he will come to judge us. If we are found faithful, we will escape the wrath to come, and be forever blessed with Him who lives forever, world without end, Amen

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