When Did the World End?

Propers: First Sunday of Advent, AD 2021 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

When did the world end, exactly? Well, that depends on whom you ask.

St John—“the disciple whom Jesus loved”—tells us that Judgment Day was none other than the Crucifixion, that the world as we know it ended upon the Cross of Jesus Christ. “Now is the judgment of this world,” declares Jesus in John’s Gospel; “now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

For St Peter, in the Book of Acts, the world ends at Pentecost, 50 days after the Resurrection, when the Holy Spirit of Christ is poured out upon the Apostles, and they are transformed from a cowering rabble to bold and fearless witnesses. “This is what was spoken through the prophet,” Peter says. “In the last days … I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh … And I will show portents in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist.”

For the Synoptic Gospels, and for the Book of Revelation, the end of the world appears to be the destruction of Jerusalem, and the burning of the Temple, in AD 70—less than one biblical generation from the life of Jesus Christ, just as He’d predicted. The loss of Jerusalem was the loss of everything we had known of God. Israel was scattered, the Temple wiped off the map. Who would be Israel now? Who would be the Temple now? A New Covenant, it seemed, was needed for a new age.

My point is this: we get the end of the world wrong. And because we get it wrong, we often assume that Jesus and Paul and the early Christians got it wrong. But that’s because we are literalists in ways that they were not. You’ve heard me say this before: apocalypse is a literary genre. It uses fantastic imagery to interpret contemporary crises through a religious lens, to assure us that God is with us, that He has an end planned for us, a good one, and that this here isn’t it. There’s more to our story than the crisis of the moment.

In the end, everything will be all right. If it’s not all right, it’s not yet the end. That’s an apocalypse in a nutshell.

The Bible makes it clear that there is no one single Day of the Lord, not in the sense of a specific calendar date. Apocalyptic cults throughout history have tried to pinpoint the Last Day, with farcical and often tragic results. But there is no one historical Judgment Day just as there is no one historical day of creation. Yes, the cosmos had a beginning, and will surely have an end.

But every single day is a day of creation. Every day, in every moment, God is creating us, sustaining us, redeeming us—bringing us to the fulness of life which He intends for all that He has made. God is not simply our Creator way back in prehistory. God is creating all of us right here and now.

And the same can be said for the Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment. Any fair reading of the Scriptures will reveal not one prophesied Day of the Lord, but many. The Day of the Lord is a day of reckoning whenever God’s justice and mercy and truth break into our world from their source in His eternity.

When tyrants are toppled, that’s Judgment Day. When the poor are uplifted, that’s Judgment Day. When slaves are freed and oppressors stopped and the hungry fed and the orphan housed, that’s Judgment Day. Remember the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

When truth and right and liberation cannot be denied, that’s the Day of the Lord. That’s eternity breaking into time. And we may only get it in glimpses. We may only experience such judgments as a foretaste of the feast to come. But there can be no doubt that one day Goodness and Truth and Beauty will suffuse the whole of God’s Creation, and the light of that glory, the heat of that flame, will burn out of us every impurity, every corruption, every shadowed hidden place. And we will shine like the stars in the sky. Stars are our icons of angels and saints.

Judgment Day is our union with God, the union of time and eternity, Creator and Creation. And so we know the Judgment in Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s who He is: fully God and fully Man. He is the Adam whom we were meant to be. And because of this, we know our end. We know our fate. We will come to union with God. We are coming there even now. He gives to us His Word, His Body, His Spirit, His Blood. He gives to us everything He has, everything He is.

And so we are Jesus now. We are the foretaste for all the world to see; that we might bring comfort, forgiveness, and resurrection to everyone and everything throughout this fallen sphere. We are glimpses of eternity in time. We are Jesus sent not to condemn the world but that all the world might be saved in Him. The world ends for us in Baptism, in the day that we died and rose.

Now, today is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of our new liturgical year. In Judaism, the Torah is read all the way through on an annual basis, and the same day that the last book is finished, the reading starts over from the beginning. Thus the reading is never over; it starts on the day that it ends. Advent feels a bit like that. We ended the year last week talking about the end of the world, and here we are doing it again, reading texts of Judgment Day on the first of our New Year.

Why talk about endings on a day of new beginnings? Why talk about the End of Days when we’re just now starting to prepare for Jesus’ birth?

Advent indeed is a time of waiting, of preparation. It isn’t about us going out to God. It’s about preparing our hearts and homes to receive Him, to be still and know that the King has come. Adventus, after all, means coming, arriving, meeting. In ancient Rome “adventus” referred to a ceremony by which a city would formally receive the visiting Emperor. That’s what we must imagine ourselves doing.

Yet while we are quite naturally focused on preparations for Christmas, Jesus does not come to us in only just one way. He comes to us, as we like to say, in history, mystery, and majesty: history, in that He is born to us in Bethlehem of Judea; mystery, in that He enters this community of faith by Word and by Sacrament; and majesty, in the Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment, when eternity breaks into time, and shall one day consume all things in the life-giving flames of the Spirit.

See, it’s always Judgment Day for us. It’s always the Crucifixion. It’s always Pentecost. It’s always the death of what we thought we knew to rise in some new form. The end of the world, after all, does not imply that life will simply cease. Something’s end means more than mere termination. An end is a purpose, a meaning, a goal. “To what end?” we ask. “For what reason?” The end of the world is the goal of the world, and we know that this is union within God.

For us, this union has already been accomplished in Jesus Christ our Lord. He is our end. He is our purpose. He is the reason for everything and the logic behind it all, which is precisely why John calls Him the Logos, the Word in the mind of God. That is who is born for us in Bethlehem; that is who meets us in Word and water, bread and wine; and that is who promises to us a judgment that will purify all things.

When did the world end, exactly? It ended today. It always ends today. And in Christ it is always reborn.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.