Next Sunday we will celebrate the first Sunday of Advent and the start of a new liturgical year. With it we will set our sight upon His first coming at Christmas. Today we celebrate the Last Sunday after Pentecost which concludes our liturgical year. Today we set our sight upon the fact of His second coming at the end of time. Therefore, what we celebrate today as well as what we will soon prepare for meet. We now anticipate the coming of Christ for the first and the second time.
When it pertains to the Second Coming everyone would like to know when it will occur. There are many who spend their time chasing after the signs of the times to affix a date to the Second Coming. Even at the time of Saint Paul there were those who were convinced that Christ’s Second Coming would be during their lifetime. The best answer to when it will occur comes to us from Jesus Himself who said, “No one knows the day or hour.”
In modern times there are those of other faith traditions who place their emphasis upon the Rapture. It is at the Rapture that those who believe will be taken up and those who do not will be left. Traditional Catholic thought instead places emphasis upon the coming of the Parousia which is a time of fulfillment through Christ. Saint Paul makes use of the dead rising in “a blink of an eye.” Then is his Epistle to the 1st Thessalonians we are told that they will be snatched up in order to meet Christ in the clouds.
Saint Paul is not making reference to the rapture, but to the fact that the dead will go out to meet the Lord and they will return with Him in glory. For the Greco-Roman world a parousia is a celebration of arrival. Thus when a person of status arrived they would be ready to greet them and to accompany them. This is what we now prepare for as we contemplate the Second Coming of Christ.
As we profess in the Creed that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and of his kingdom there will be no end.” As we come to this final Sunday in the liturgical year we further profess this reality. We now prepare for His Second Coming by how we come to order our life on this earth. So too, even though, this is the final Sunday of the liturgical year will a new year spring forth. In all things we realize that we should be prepared to encounter Christ.
Advent assists us in encountering Him at His first coming and we then must daily prepare for His second coming. Let us do all that we can in order to prepare for this life giving reality. If we were to realize that our life on this earth should be ordered towards Christ and the Kingdom which is to come then we would order life in a way which is worthy to encounter Him.
