“It’s the end of the world as we know it”: that’s the lyric from the band REM’s hit song of the same name from distant 1987. The rest of the song lyric doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, just one thing after another; an exercise in stream of consciousness. The one thing that comes through is the repeated refrain: “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” In other words, the phrase means it’s not the end of the literal world, just the end of the world that we knew; the end of the world that we were comfortable navigating in. Familiar features have disappeared, and we have to adjust. “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
In our Gospel this morning, Jesus predicts the end of the world that the people of his day knew: the world of Jerusalem and the temple; a world of relative peace and settled quiet. Of course, ancient Judea was an occupied region, kept peaceful by the Roman army; violence was always within arm’s reach. Chaos could break out at any time, and in fact did so, which makes our Lord’s prophecy of the end believable.
According to Jesus, the temple, the center of worship and the People’s religious life, was to be thrown down and destroyed, but not immediately. First, there would be wars and insurrections; then earthquake, fire, and plague. There will be signs in heaven and persecutions for the faithful. As Jesus says in his prophecy, “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name” (Lk. 21:16-17). Only then will the end of the old order come.
For the ancient Israelites it was to be the end of the world as they knew it; a world centered around the city and the temple. The violence that lurked just below the surface of their world would break out in horrible fashion, overtaking everything that they had known and closing out the age. In fact, this prophecy came true just a few years later as the Roman legions surrounded the rebellious city and destroyed it completely.
Yet the end did not come immediately. In fact, a lot hangs on this word “immediately.” For the Gospel writer Luke, the meantime was important: what Jesus calls a few verses on “the times of the Gentiles” (Lk. 21:24) in which the Church would hang on patiently. As Jesus says in our reading today, “By your endurance you will gain your souls” (Lk. 21:19). Luke, in his Gospel and Acts, tells a larger story in which the Church endures and carries forward its mission. In this meantime, there was work to be done; a Gospel to be proclaimed and God’s plan to unfold. The Gentile nations were to be offered everlasting life, before the end would come.
This is the meantime that we all live in, the meantime implied by Jesus’ words “not immediately”; the end of the world as we know it. With increasing experience of life I come to realize that the world that we know is always passing away. Usually there is a conspicuous lack of drama as the present slips into the past, but occasionally the future catches up with us suddenly and all at once, and we realize that the old world has ended and something new has begun. That’s what Jesus is pointing us to today.
The end may not be exactly like the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, that Jesus prophesizes this morning, but it may bring one epoch to an end and inaugurate another. That’s the nature of the meantime we live in: always becoming something else. In the midst of this, Jesus’ words ring true, “By your endurance you will gain your souls” (Lk. 21:19).
That’s our vocation in the Church: to persist in the meantime, to endure and gain our souls. The end is not yet, in the sense of Jesus’ return in glory, but the world that we know is always coming to an end. The present is the time of action, in which we carry out our ministry fully. This is the time that has been given to us, to faithfully respond to Jesus’ call in our lives.
This meantime is the time of Christian vocation. Our confirmands are showing us the way as they renew their baptismal vows and receive the gift of the Spirit, so that they can respond to God in their lives more faithfully. May God give all of us the grace that we need to respond to Our Lord’s claim upon our lives, as we seek to be Jesus’ disciples in the world today.
