The Past
Jesus said to his disciples:
“In those days after that tribulation
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from the sky,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.“And then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in the clouds’
with great power and glory,
and then he will send out the angels
and gather his elect from the four winds,
from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.“Learn a lesson from the fig tree.
When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves,
you know that summer is near.
In the same way, when you see these things happening,
know that he is near, at the gates.
Amen, I say to you,
this generation will not pass away
until all these things have taken place.
Heaven and earth will pass away,
but my words will not pass away.“But of that day or hour, no one knows,
neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
The reaction to these scary and ominous lines in the Gospel of Mark (13:24-32), which is becoming of a true believer, is found in Psalm 131:2.
Rather, I have stilled my soul, hushed it like a weaned child. Like a weaned child on its mother’s lap, so is my soul within me.
The graphic description of the final days of this world with the sun darkening, the moon not giving out its pale light anymore, and the stars hurtling down to earth, is only one additional element for us to place next to the many instances in which our heart is frightened and tension steals peace from our mind.
What keeps us awake at night could be something very personal, or concerning our family directly, our Church, our nation, if not the whole world. Our hearts can be frightened by an array of causes that are too many to count, as their number seems to increase with every passing day. Our worries, added to other people’s worries, make up “the end of the world” or, at least, the end of our world. Yet, as believers, we should have conflicting feelings about it. We should desire the end of all evils as we pray constantly: but delivers us from evil.
However, as believers, we must be focused on the positive aspect of the end of the world.
Christ took on human flesh like ours; crisscrossed Palestine proclaiming the good news; endured a most cruel passion and horrific death; and rose victorious over all evils, death included, to create a new world order grounded on forgiveness, justice, compassion, love, cooperation, and solidarity.
As believers, as sharers in Christ’s victory, we cannot stop and consider our mission accomplished if we only did contribute to the elimination of evil in our corner of the world. If our mission were accomplished by the defeat of evil, in our gospel passage, Jesus would not have urged us to learn a lesson from the fig tree.
There is nothing frightening about it. It speaks of a future of hope, of full and enthusiastic engagement, of productivity, of concrete accomplishments. Hence, in our common quest for comfort and reassurance about the future, we ought to look at the past…
“The past?” you might wonder, thinking of the mixture of joys and sorrows that we cannot bring back, or relive. No, I am referring to God’s action in our past, of what he has done to prove to our frightened and unsettled hearts that he is still in control, as he has been all along and as it is fully recorded in Holy Scripture.
God’s past is interwoven with ours, inseparable, and lived out side by side. By inviting us to look at the fig tree, Jesus is asking us to recall the experience we acquired from past spring times, when we noticed how its branches became tender and sprouted leaves. That experience guarantees us that in the summer there will be plenty of delicious figs!
Recollection of the past, in which some of Christ’s enemies have already been vanquished and have become his footstool (cf. Hebrews 10: 13) must spur us to be fully engaged in establishing his Kingdom of peace, forgiveness, justice, compassion, love, cooperation, and solidarity. Recollection of the past ought to assure us that, not only Christ has shouldered all our pain, our defeats, our anxiety, all our sins, but he has also perfected us through his supreme sacrifice on the cross (cf. Hebrews 10:14).
Thus, in the frightening context of the end of the world, mitigated by the hope-filled lesson of the fig tree, we must believe that in Jesus’ sacrifice all our pains, all our fears, all our apprehensions, all our anxieties, all the evil that we have endured and all the evil that we, in our weakness, have caused to others have been conquered.
That certitude shall enable us to rest blissfully like a weaned child on its mother’s lap, with renewed trust and confidence in our Lord, and empower us to be driven by unstoppable hope to work for his cause.
Free of undue apprehension, the only thoughts that should fill our days, then, should be thoughts of finding the best possible way of becoming for each other what the Risen Lord has been and is for us.
