St John the Evangelist Parish

November 17, 2024

Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

I recently moved into a new neighborhood. On my first evening, I went grocery shopping and could not find my favorite Greek yogurt. Strangely, my heart started to race. All the losses of my previous life hit me. So many of my old friends, habits, comforts, and predictable experiences had fallen away. There I stood, a grown man, crying like a little boy whose world was falling apart in the dairy aisle.

This week, Jesus describes what to do when one world ends and another begins. Does it apply to the end of time? Yes. Does it apply to the end of our individual lives? Yes. It also applies to every “world” we inhabit throughout our lives, in school, family, friendships, work, play, and so on. First, the sun, moon, and stars fall. The old, familiar ways of running things suddenly stop working. Light fades. Things fall apart. It’s awful. But, second, Christ comes “in the clouds.” Jesus, the Son of Man, replaces those old powers with himself as the prime governing principle. Third, he sends out his angels to “gather his elect from the four winds.” He re-integrates the fragments into a new integrated whole. “Summer is near,” he concludes. A new world begins.

Is your world crumbling? Are your sun, moon, and stars falling from the sky? Learn to discern the pattern of the Cross and Resurrection at work in it. This is the power we touch in the Mass. Jesus is coming precisely in this transition from the old to the new world. It doesn’t make our losses easy. But it does make it possible to glimpse the dawning of a summer, a new beginning, the life of the world to come.