The End is Nay, or is it Nigh?
In Advent the Church directs our attention into the future before we contemplate the events of the past. Many get this wrong. All too often people see Advent as a semi-festive season culminating in the near-term future event of Christmas. Many parishes will have ‘Advent trees’ and/or ‘Advent wreaths’ that mimic their Christmas counterparts, with the exception of having violet decorations. Yes, there is an Advent wreath, not many, but there is no such thing as an ‘Advent tree.’ The purpose of these wreaths and trees is to give a foretaste of Christmas, keeping people’s focus on December 25th rather than the event Church wants us to contemplate in the first part of Advent.
The future event that the Church asks us to consider, which more and more people are happy to avoid, is the Second Coming of Christ at the end of time. Most people do not want to admit that there will be an end. But there will be an end whether we like it or not. The Old Testament hints that the world will end. Jesus is much more explicit. For example, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man” (Mt 24:35-39). There are other examples as well, none of which present a happy picture of the end. This gets more explicit in the Book of Revelation: “I heard a loud voice speaking from the temple to the seven angels, ‘Go and pour out the seven bowls of God’s fury upon the earth.’ The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the earth. Festering and ugly sores broke out on those who had the mark of the beast or worshiped its image. The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea. The sea turned to blood like that from a corpse; every creature living in the sea died. The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water. These also turned to blood” (Rev 16:1-4).
The end is an unpleasant concept, but it is certain. It is even certain from a scientific perspective. The world will end because the sun becomes a red giant, much much larger than its current size, and the earth will first be burned to a cinder before being consumed by the sun. Or the earth will be hit with a comet or an asteroid, killing all life on earth. Or the sun will shower the earth with a massive solar flare, a coronal mass ejection, that ends civilization as we know it. Or a gamma ray burst from within the Milky Way galaxy, perhaps caused by the impact of two stars, might hit the earth destroying the ozone layer and frying all life on earth. Or we can cause our own demise by war, manmade pandemic, social breakdown, or the collapse of the ecosystem through the extinction of pollinators or some other key element of the food chain.
Likewise, we are no strangers to the alarmist doomsday scenarios that have been foist upon us since the 1970s: global cooling and the coming ice age, overpopulation, nuclear winter, depletion of the ozone layer, deforestation, mass extinctions with claims of hundreds of species going extinct every day, global warming, climate change, and so on. While we are familiar with these popular doomsday predictions, they all share the same characteristic: they are all avoidable if we cease doing this or we begin doing that. The truth is, the world will end at some point in the future, perhaps the distant future, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Yes, we might cause the end, but we can’t prevent its eventuality any more than we can prevent the sun from consuming the earth.
So, whether we like it or not, the world will end. It is a matter of when and how. Jesus assures us that it will happen at an unknown time in the future and challenges us to be ready, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap. For that day will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth. Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man” (Lk 21:34-36).
—Fr Booth