33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

1st Reading: Dan. 12: 1-3. The prophet’s vision of the end of times.
2nd Reading: Heb. 10: 11-14, 18. Christ’s sacrifice was perfect and made once for all.

Gospel: Mk 13: 24-32. Jesus uses poetic language to describe the fall and judgment of Jerusalem.

Points for Reflection-From Fr Carlo Tei

• This Sunday’s Gospel is Mark’s description of the fall and judgment of Jerusalem, not of the end of the world and the last judgment.

• The coming on the clouds of the Son of Man (Dan. 7: 13) in the New Testament indicates Christ’s Resurrection and enthronement as Lord of the universe, events which have inaugurated the last times, the new and definitive era of mankind’s history. “The day of God”, therefore, indicates the time intermediate between the Paschal event and the banquet in God’s Kingdom. It is the time in which the Church has to play an important role in the salvation history. In a word: it is the time of the Church.

• The Church was wanted by Jesus Christ to succeed Israel as assembler of the nations. We are the “angels”, the messengers Jesus is unceasingly sending in order to gather the nations until the day He will come again in glory. Jesus, in a way, had already started reassembling mankind into God’s family. He started a movement of universal love, by loving all people and all different categories of people, especially the lowly, the most neglected and despised, thus revealing to us that we are all called to be children of the Father and members of his family. This prompted him to lay down his life for those he loved. And his sacrifice, according to the Letter to the Hebrews (Second Reading), was perfect and made once for all. Yet, it was like a seed, which had but to grow. Jesus did not bring fulfillment ready made. He planted the living seed: the accomplishment will eventually come from on high; but, before then, there must be a process of growth. This is the task of the Church, our task: to reassemble all the nations “from the four winds”.

• But, in performing this task, we must always remember that there is only one leader in the process: the Son of Man, the crucified and risen Jesus. So, we contribute to the gathering of all the nations into the family of God only if we imitate Jesus Christ, through a brotherly love as universal as his love for us. The greatest obstacles to our work of evangelization and, therefore, to the reassembly of mankind into God’s family are the man-made barriers of separation among peoples and individuals, such as egoism, selfishness, nationalism and racism.

• If we let Christ’s universal love take root deeply in our hearts, it will blossom in our daily lives and make us “the angels sent by him to gather his elect from the four winds”.