RBWords

     When your country or your culture is in a ruin and all the stable surroundings that gave meaning to your day to day faith and lifestyle are missing and you are under persecution, the tendency is to turn to the imagination to find some way to interpret events and move forward.  (Viktor Frankl's classic work MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING comes to mind.)  It describes his experience with a Nazi concentration camp!  The Book of Daniel  (Ezekiel, etc.)and the gospels and the Book of Revelation all sought to being meaning to the current circumstances of the communities they were written for.  The language is vivid and mysterious to us centuries later, but was a coded way to speak to the audiences.  In the case of Daniel, the audience would have been the Jewish community under the Greek-oriented political rulers who were trying to introduce, by violence if necessary, Greek religious practices and culture.  In the case of Luke (and the other gospels and Revelation) the language is addressed to a community which was re-orienting itself after the destruction of Jerusalem.  The central point in all of it is that faith in God's power will overcome all earthly powers.  Until that final triumph, believers must continually remain faithful to what had been passed down to them.  Terrible persecutions and other destructive events might make them believe the end of time had come and give rise to an immediate triumph of God, but Jesus warns us that his ultimate return cannot be calculated on earthly events even if they resemble the end of things. 

     It is a common expression: "the end of _______________as we know it."  One can fill in "America" or "Catholic Church" or any other important "meaning-giving" thing or belief.  Jesus warns us that the "as we know it" does not mean the "end of things."  We must wait in faith and use whatever the Holy Spirit gives us at the time to understand its mysterious ways.  AMEN