33rd Sunday of the Year, B

            It is appropriate that Advent -- now only two weeks away -- should come with the approach of winter, in the midst of autumn, when the year is winding down.  For the season of Advent is about the end of things... and the beginning of something new and extraordinary.    Autumn, for many people the most glorious of seasons, is honest in its beauty.  It promises nothing, except the arrival of winter.  Autumn’s very beauty, we know, is a kind of dying:  the splendid show of color in the leaves is caused by the sap of life retreating to the roots, and the leaves’ turning to red and gold and amber is the first signs of decay.

            And so autumn marks the end, the end of a year, the winding down of things.  In the Church we approach now the end of a liturgical year.  Ordinary time, the time of green vestments, the time of growth, of reflecting on the whole of the Christian mystery, and yet the in-between time, after Easter and before Advent and Christmas – Ordinary time is drawing to a close.  The end of things. 

            The end of time.  This is what today’s readings are about.  This is what is signaled by the melancholic beauty of autumn, by the Church’s liturgical calendar -- the end of all things, of time.  “The heavens and the earth,” our Lord said, “will pass away.”  They will all pass away at Christ’s appearing, at His Advent.  The signs of that coming are all around us, perhaps so close and so usual that they may escape our notice.  “Learn a lesson from the fig tree,” Jesus urges us in today’s gospel.  “Once the sap of its branches runs high and it begins to sprout leaves, you know that summer is near.”  But that happens every year, year in and year out.  Yes, and year in and year out, the sap runs low, the leaves turn color, fade and fall away.  Life and death.  Beginning and end.  There’s the lesson:  whatever has a beginning has an end.  This is our experience of all things in this life -- beginning and end.  Jesus is simply saying, so it is with the created order itself.  “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not shed its light, stars will fall out of the skies, and the heavenly hosts will be shaken.”   The winding down of the universe itself, a fact that we are now scientifically aware of.  The universe is losing steam.  It’s slowing down.  It has an end.

            But our Lord adds something unusual:  “I assure you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.  The heavens and earth will pass away, but my words will not.”  How is it that all that we still wait for took place in Jesus’ own time?  Well, that’s because it all took place in Him.  Peoples of all times like to think, to humor themselves, that theirs is the culmination of all ages.  Perhaps our own era feels more strongly this than any other age.  But the culmination, the climax, of history did not occur with the invention of the television and will not occur with the first human to walk on Mars.  The high point of history occurred when God died on a cross two thousand years ago and rose again from the dead.   

            That’s why the Church has always felt herself as living in the last days.  That’s why the Church, year in and year out, celebrates each season of the liturgical calendar -- beginning, surprisingly, at the end, with Advent, again, that season when we remember that the end of time will come with our Lord in glory, when He will come, as the Creed says, to judge the living and the dead.  We quickly move on to Christmas, the birth of our hope, into Lent when we remember Christ’s suffering and death on our behalf; with the culmination at Easter, the Holy Day of His resurrection.  And then back into Ordinary time, where we are now, into the summer time of our faith.  Over and over again, we go through the rhythm of the liturgical seasons, and we pay attention to the passing from spring to winter – not to get caught in a cycle of timelessness, but to remind ourselves, again and again, that all things move from beginning to an end.   Our own lives from birth to death.  Time had a start, and there is a day coming when it will be no more.

            And so as we approach Advent, the Church would have us meditate on this movement, this progress toward the fulfillment of all things in Christ whose appearance will bring an end to the story we call history.  It is for us, then, a time of preparation.  We examine our lives in the light of His Advent and the judgment that accompanies His coming.  But we do so in hope, because the second part of Advent, for which we wait each year in a special way, is all about Christmas, His first coming, His Advent that brought into the world the hope of all peoples, so that we do not await the end in dread, but with the profound hope that the one who first secured our redemption is returning to fulfill His pledge to us, if we stay true to Him.

            The present liturgical season -- Ordinary time -- closes with the sense of urgency, the urgency we should feel to stop, reflect, to break out of just letting the days go by one after another as if this will go on forever.  The closing of this season reminds us to put our lives in perspective, to renew our understanding of the meaning in the very nature of things, the passing of the seasons from spring to winter, the cycle of the Church’s own liturgical life:  we are going somewhere; there is a rhyme and a reason to this movement in our experience in this world.  And it all points to something beyond this world, beyond the daily schedule, way beyond the sometimes-felt drudgery of life.  It points to Christ.  It directs our attention to Him whose death and resurrection to this day is how we even divide up world history, because we know that His first coming was what brought us new life, and His second coming will make it manifest to us in the glory of eternity.  Meanwhile, day to day -- and especially in these days of upcoming Advent -- we prepare ourselves.  For the story of our lives on this earth has a beginning, it has a plot, it is full of meaning, because it is going somewhere, and like all stories it has an end, an end that in Christ makes for the beginning of something more glorious than we can even imagine.