A Homily for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost

+ “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
 
It is all well and good for Our Lord to have said this, but all that He says in the Holy Gospel of this Mass is so unsettling that it was removed entirely from the lectionary in the reform which produced that which is called “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman rite.” (Traditiones custodes, art. 1). It would seem that ‘modern man’ is not allowed to hear Our Lord when he speaks of realities that may upset his equilibrium.
 
With all the respect due to the post-conciliar reformers who sought to have these words of Our Lord themselves pass away, to the promulgators and promotors of the reformed liturgical books, and to those who rather a-historically hold them to be the only legitimate form of worship in the Latin rite, I beg to differ. These words, known and meditated on in liturgical Tradition and commented on by the Fathers of the Church, have much to say to us. Our Lord’s stern warnings were uttered for a purpose—our salvation, nothing less. They must not be muted.
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Let us prescind from the temptation to speculate on antichrists and abominable idols that desecrate sacred places in our times. An obsession with these warnings can create a devastatingly destructive spiritual paranoia, even if we must be clear that idolatry abounds and must rightly be resisted, and that false Christs, too, may well appear, and must not be heeded.
 
But what we must not pass over or ignore is the clear teaching of Our Lord that for His elect, for those who are faithful to His teaching, trials and tribulation are coming. They are inevitable.
 
We know this: the life of the Christian is the via crucis. We must each carry the cross.  Our daily determination to avoid the occasions of sin and grow in virtue costs a great deal. Past sins and enduring habits of sin weigh heavily upon us—sometimes more heavily than we think we can bear.
 
When the trial of profound personal suffering arrives, its uninvited and often unimagined form is a grave shock, and the temptation to despair can be real as we anxiously try to find a way to move forward.
 
So too, the Church herself is not exempt from trials and tribulations, as history more than adequately demonstrates. We expect these: her mission is to stand as a beacon of Truth in a world of lies. And the Prince of Lies is dedicated to doing all that he and his legions can to bring her, and us, down.
 
Attacks from without are one thing. Attacks from within are more insidious and can leave us demoralised and deflated. Our Lord’s warning of false Christs, which echo His warnings about false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing and which were taken up by Saint Paul in his turn, are deeply unnerving—particularly given that in our own day there is no shortage of doctrinal dissonance in the Church where harmony is what is due.
 
It can seem at times that everything is collapsing around me, indeed within me. The waves of the crises that batter us appear utterly too powerful: to offer any resistance seems futile. 
 
My brothers and sisters, Our Lord’s words this morning do not hide this terrible reality which we shall all face in varying ways. Trials and tribulations do await us, and even if we have already been through much, more yet is to come. But Our Lord does not teach us this truth in order to drive us away, or so that we shall sink into the quicksand of despair. No: He does so in order to prepare us, to forewarn us as it were. For the Christian life is that of the via crucis. It costs. But it has its reward.

For, as Our Lord teaches us this morning, the trials and tribulations we shall experience, howsoever horrendous they may be, shall be as nothing in the fact of the triumph when we see "the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory; and He [sends] out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they [gather] his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to another."
 
Our task, then, indeed our God-given duty, is to persevere unto the end—be that to the end of our lives or even to the end of the world, should that arrive—in order to participate in Our Lord’s definitive, cosmic triumph over evil. That involves accepting the suffering that comes to us—even as we rightly seek to remove it or lessen its impact. For suffering generously accepted and offered to God is a beautiful and truly salvific reality. It involves clinging on to the Truth when its implications seems least comprehensible, or when almost everyone rejects it. It involves, at times, being rejected as was Our Lord Himself. It involves the Cross. And by the Cross sin and death have been conquered once and for all.

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away,” Our Lord teaches us this morning. We must never doubt this, whatever lies ahead. And in persevering in this Truth, we must not fail to make frequent use of the weapons He has given us to prepare us for the combat that awaits us: daily prayer, frequent confession and fruitful participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at least every Sunday. For the perseverance we need, and for the prudence duly to equip ourselves for it, let us pray with fervour at the altar this morning. +

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