Next week we
come to the end of the Church’s liturgical year and therefore on this Sunday
the readings traditionally speak about the end of the world and the final
coming of Jesus. There is a lot of symbolic language in today’s Gospel, some of it which may distress us. The
opening verses tell us of great destruction of things that we know we cannot
survive without – the sun, the moon. The Gospel goes on to speak about the
gathering of a great community. People in Jesus’s time believed that the end
would come in their life-time. Jesus says that no one will know when this is to
happen and that it is not for us to worry about. What we should be concerned
about is how to live every day in God’s love and service.
Today,
we might recall times where we thought our worlds had ended because we lost
something so important to us or we were suffering in some way. During that time
it may have seemed like nothing would be the same again, but it was temporary;
a new or different way of life was opened up to us as a result. The parable of
the fig tree in the middle of this Gospel speaks to us about life and hope. In
the midst of winter a small sign of hope was there even though we may not have
seen it.
‘When you see these things
taking place, you know that he is near.’ (Mark 13:29)
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