Father Rick Bolte's Homily

B:33ND SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Is anyone here worried about 2012?  Hopefully and presumably not.  But it is the latest of the predictions of the end time.  Jesus tells us in today’s gospel reading that no one knows; not the angels and not even himself, only the Father.  That hasn’t kept people from trying to guess though.

Even in today’s gospel there is what scripture scholars believe is a guess at the end time.  The community that Mark’s Gospel is written for is enduring persecution from the Jews.  The author is trying to encourage the members of the community to not lose heart but to persevere.  He takes what scholars believe to be Jesus’ prediction that the kingdom would be revealed to the present generation and makes it a prediction that the fulfilled kingdom would be revealed in the present generation.  I, of course, was not.

For centuries people have taken the description of the cosmic nature of God’s power and tried to devise clues to the final times.  The prediction that the sun would be darkened and the moon stop shining is interpreted to be an eclipse.  People look of total eclipses and any increase of frequency.  The prediction of stars falling from the sky is interpreted to mean meteors or manmade space debris falling back to earth.  The fact that these cosmic occurrences fit better into their limited understanding of the universe than ours is ignored.

The real meaning of these and other predictions of various calamities is not about giving clues as to when the kingdom would be fulfilled.  The Old Testament predictions were for the coming of the messiah.  This was seen as a great powerful and cosmic event as the message the messiah was to bring would turn the world upside down.  Jesus’ message was just that as he said “the first shall be last and the last first.”  The people of Jesus’ time missed that message as they were looking for a messiah that was powerful as the world knows power, not as God does.

Many people today are still expecting the fulfillment of God’s kingdom to be a powerful event and people see power.  They take the cosmic predictions of the Old Testament and the New and try to literally interpret them for today.  Unfortunately people mistake this as the faith Jesus called for.  But to believe God has the power to destroy the world or to cause cosmic events is not great faith.  For many this leads to private piety where individuals try to be “good” so as to be on the right side when Jesus returns.  The immanent predictions give impetus to get their behavior in line.

But Jesus never calls people to pull back from society as some great evil beyond repair and just focus on one’s own person piety.  Jesus came to save sinners and has passed on that mission to us.  Jesus came indeed to reveal his kingdom to us.  He tells us frequently that the kingdom is already in our midst.  The real challenge of faith is not to believe in God’s cosmic power to destroy the world but to believe in God’s power to bring his kingdom to fulfillment.

Every time we pray the Our Father, the only prayer we have from Jesus, we pray that his “kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven.”  Faith is to believe in the face of all the problems we see in our world.  And perhaps the greatest challenge of faith of all is to have faith in ourselves as God does.  Even though we are sinners and limited in so many ways, God chooses to be one with us.  This is what we celebrate every time we receive Communion.  Jesus chooses to live in our hearts and to act through us despite all our perceptions of our inadequacies.  God has faith in us.  We become the Body of Christ active in our world.  We are charged to bring to fulfillment God’s kingdom.  It’s not about earthly power and ability but faith in God’s power, the power of love.  We are to bring to fulfillment the turning of the world upside down.  We can’t do it ourselves but God can do it through us.  Let us be a people of faith who know and trust the power of God!