The end of time both scares and fascinates us, so it’s little wonder that movies about the end of the world are a Hollywood staple. While many of them are quite creative, none talk about what is actually going to happen, as described in today’s Gospel.

When the world ends, we are told that God is going to focus on one thing: How did we care for the poor, the sick, the suffering? Nothing else will matter. Just how we treated who Jesus called “the least” among us.

The world at large has the final judgment wrong, but so do many Christians. Sometimes we tend to think that God will ask us how much we prayed, how much we read about the faith, how often we had fellowship and community with others, how often we received the sacraments. All of those things are important- that’s true—but the bottom line for God is going to be how we treated others because, as Jesus says, the way we treat others is ultimately the way we treat him. As we reach the end of the Church year, we are reminded of the great responsibility God has entrusted to us to care for the people in our lives…until the end of our lives, for the extent that we serve others is the extent that we serve Christ, the King.

First Reading

Ezekiel 34:11–12, 15–17

This passage is filled with words  of  comfort.  God himself promises to be Shepherd to his sheep. Both shepherds and sheep come in for some sobering prophetic affliction in the verses before and after our reading. “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves,” we read in verse 2. In verse 18 the prophet says to the sheep, “Was it not enough for you to graze on the best pasture, that you had to trample the rest of your pastures with your feet?” As is often the case with the prophets, Ezekiel is an equal opportunity afflictor.

We in the Church read both the comfort passages and the affliction passages in the prophets as addressed to ourselves. Jesus’ solemn warning to beware when others speak well of us has been taken seriously by the Church as she expresses herself in her liturgy. We’re always warning ourselves not to get too comfortable. The comfort we draw from the image of God coming to shepherd us himself in the first verses of this reading is tempered by the last ones in which the Lord warns, “The sleek and the strong I will destroy, shepherding them rightly. As for you, my sheep, says the Lord, I will judge between one sheep and another, between rams and goats.”

Second Reading

1 Corinthians 15:20–26, 28

This passage can help us shake off our worldly, temporal thinking. We so often think of time as the enemy of life. We moderns struggle fiercely to fend off the ravages of time in the illusion that we can hold death at bay. St. Paul reminds us that time isn’t the enemy of life. In fact, time is the environment of death, the atmosphere that death breathes. When time ends, death will end with it, having no place to live and nothing left to breathe.

It can be a wonderful exercise to try to live as though we believed what Paul says. How differently we treat others when we look at them as creatures made to live in the eternity of God, as deathless persons. Strictly speaking, we’re not eternal, since we have had a beginning in time. Only God is eternal.

None that we know or have known will die. Some will rise to punishment, others to reward. Those in the latter category will be those who have struggled to subject themselves to Christ. Having been subjected to Christ, they’ll be part of the whole gift of the harvest of time, which he will offer to the Father in his eternity. What a glorious end we have and, in fact, no end at all!

Gospel Reading

Matthew 25:31–46

One of the most usual facets of Christianity is its identification with the poor. Other faiths have counseled compassion toward the poor, but Christianity identifies with the poor in a way that the others don’t. The source of that identification is in our Gospel passage this week. Jesus invites us to identify with the poor by identifying himself with them. One of the salient features of this identification with the poor is that those who seek Christ among the poor find it too little to see him in the poor; they invariably long to become poor. The whole impetus behind Franciscan minority is this desire, not only to serve the poor as one of them, but to be identifiable as another Christ by virtue of becoming one of “the least,” about whom Jesus speaks in this passage.

Buddhism scorns wealth as an accommodation to desire, based on illusion. Hinduism sees poverty as the result of bad karma or as an aid to righting karma. Only in Christianity does poverty take on a human face, indeed, a divine face.

DIGGING DEEPER:
Judgment Day

“Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ. The New Testament speaks of judgment primarily in its aspect of the final encounter with Christ in his second coming, but also repeatedly affirms that each will be rewarded immediately after death in accor- dance with his works and faith. The parable of the poor man Lazarus and the words of Christ on the cross to the good thief, as well as other New Testament texts speak of a final destiny of the soul—a destiny which can be different for some and for others.

“Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the bless- edness of heaven—through a purification or immediately, —or immediate and everlasting damnation.” (CCC 1021-1022)

PRAYER:

RESOLUTION:

Reprinted from  Opening the Word at Formed.org .
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