33rd Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA
The
Man and The Boy—father and son—walk through an unnamed country
laid waste by greed, hubris, and stupidity. There is nothing now but
bitter ash, steel-gray bones, and cold human savagery. When the
apocalypse arrived, it arrived with a whisper—no warning: no time
to think, to pray, to remember. Those who survive do not gives thanks
to luck or God; they do not count themselves among the fittest or the
privileged. They are damned to live, damned to living on so little
that it could be nothing with the next step, the next breath. The Man
and The Boy have fire. And they carry this fire toward somewhere That
Way. Anywhere but Here. Since God did not show His face nor did He
send His angels to rebuke the stupidity of Man, The Man and The Boy
walk. That's their prayer, their itinerant liturgy of starvation and
unrelenting fear. What the world is for them now is nothing. There is
nothing now but the world abandoned, left to rot as it turns around a
star no one will ever see rise again. Jesus warns: “All that you
see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone
upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” Who will you be
when everything is thrown down?
That
question—who will you be when everything is thrown down?—is the
question our apocalyptic literature asks us to ponder. From the Book
of Daniel to the Book
of Revelation, from
The War of the Worlds
to World War Z and
The Walking
Dead, we are
confronted again and again with the possibility that everything we
know and love will come to an abrupt, explosive end, and we will be
left with nothing. In Cormac McCarthy's world-ending novel, The
Road, a man and his
son walk toward an undefined, undisclosed Somewhere. Mid-way through
their pilgrimage, McCarthy gives us a vision: “[The Man] walked out
in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the
absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the
intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in
their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And
somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their
cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which
to sorrow it.” What is the absolute truth of the world? Cold,
unrelenting, darkness. And who are we? Hunted animals living on
borrowed time. Believe it or not, this post-apocalyptic nightmare is
for some among us a dream come true, and serves not only as a vision
of things to come but as a philosophy as well, a settled-upon way of
thinking about life.
That
some of us would celebrate “the crushing black vacuum of the
universe” and prefer to see themselves as “hunted animals
trembling. . .in their cover” shouldn't surprise us. Given fallen
human nature and the excuse of There Is No God So All Is Permitted,
why not think of creation as a random cosmic process and humanity as
prey-animals. Helmut Thielicke calls this attitude nihilism, writing,
“Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, that
ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless.” Our
own cultural turn to nihilism is attributed to the 19th
c. German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose anti-Christ
prophet, Zarathustra proclaimed the death of God. Nietzsche wrote,
“Nihilism is. . .not only the belief that everything deserves to
perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one
destroys.”
Contemporary nihilists continue the tradition. Nothing is true.
Nothing is good or beautiful. Nothing matters. There is no point. No
hope. No faith. Just destroy it all, release nothingness from its
confining order, and let chaos reign.
Who
will you be when everything is thrown down? Apocalypse fascinates
western man b/c he wants to know who he is w/o the confining order of
law, family, moral obligation, or God. Who am I really
in the absence of tradition, science, the transcendent? If McCarthy's
novel can be taken as a partial answer, Western Man is a violent
serial rapist just one missed-meal away from becoming a cannibal.
Jesus too gives us a glimpse of who we might become. He tells us that
we will be “seized and persecuted,” handed over by family members
and friends. At the end—the end of everything—even those who
love us will abandon us. “You will be hated by all because of my
name. . .” Is this a reason to despair? No, “not a hair on your
head will be destroyed,” he promises. And yet, even this
reassurance may seem shallow in light of the destruction of
everything we know and love. So, to put The End in the proper
perspective, we have to broaden our view to include the whole of
salvation history, the entire prophetic tradition from God's first
Word spoken over the nothingness of the void all the way to the last
flickering images of Revelation in the mind of St John. What do we
see? The long promise of God: be with Me, persevere with Me, and I
will not abandon you.
This
is the promise that tells us who and what we are right up to The End.
We are the recipients of a Divine Promise, a promise that constitutes
the foundation of our lives in faith and shapes our lives with the
hope of the resurrection. In this hope, that we will go on in the
presence of God, nothing here and now, not even the destruction of
the world, means the end of who and what we are in Christ. Because
who and what we are is Children of the Most High, the redeemed sons
and daughters of the Creator. Reaching back from this promise is the
Hand of God, anointing those who believe with the blood of the Son
and endowing them with more than just existential meaning, more than
just a temporal purpose: we are anointed prophets, priests, and kings
in the name of Christ and nothing can remove from us the ministry and
mission we have received from Him Who made us. If an apocalypse sets
fire to the whole world, nothing for us changes. We are still charged
with proclaiming the freely offered mercy of the Father through the
Son in the Holy Spirit. Jesus promises us, “By your perseverance
you will secure your lives.”
Who will we be when everything is thrown down; when not one stone is
left standing on another? With steadfast faith and iron perseverance,
we will be who we are made and saved to be: Christs for one another.
The temptation to give our praise and thanksgiving to Nothingness, to
yield our hearts and minds to the numbing background noise of
nihilism—it's constant: yield to the illusion that you are nothing
more than thinking animals! Accept that you are accidents of
chemistry and radiation! Live like commodities in a stockyard—eating,
breeding, dying like cattle. For those who worship Nothing, nothing
is sacred; nothing is good, true, beautiful. Yet we know that He Who
made us and saves us shows Himself to us through everything He has
made. So, even The End—when it comes—will reveal the glory of
God. The Good News is that the end is not The End for those who fear
His name. “There will arise the sun of justice with its healing
rays” for those live in awe of His power, His unyielding love. When
everything is bitter ash and steel-gray bones, the Son will shine and
those who look to him will see. We will see the coming of his
kingdom; his coming to rule with justice.
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