Doomsday—Pretending it won't happen
Our Lord warns his followers to watch for his coming—and not to allow themselves to be distracted by the cares or pleasures of life.
Editor’s Notes
Doomsday—Part III
In this chapter, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How burying heads in the sand is the special skill of our age
How we distract ourselves from the realities of life, death, and judgment
How even legitimate pleasures and cares can take on a life of their own.
Following his prophecies about Jerusalem's doom, Our Lord turns his attention more directly to the end of the world, making startling promises to his faithful.
This Gospel is read on the First Sunday of Advent. The following commentary deals with what comes immediately after that Gospel reading.
Advent is often thought of as the start of the new liturgical year, but as we can see, this Gospel reading flows seamlessly from that of the last Sunday of Pentecost-tide.
This is because Advent itself is not just ordered towards Christmas as the commemoration of Christ’s birth in the flesh, but also towards his Second Coming in Glory.
Doomsday for the World
From
Passiontide—Part I
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1889, Ch. XIV, pp 272-8
St. Matt. xxiv. 29–36; St. Mark xiii. 24–34; St. Luke xxi. 25, 26;
Story of the Gospels, § 144, 5.
Sung on the First Sunday of Advent
Warnings of Our Lord
Our Lord goes on, as St. Luke tells us:
‘And take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly. For as a snare shall it come upon all that sit upon the face of the earth. Watch ye, therefore, praying at all times, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are to come, and to stand before the Son of Man.’
These words are capable of application to the earlier subject of the prophecy, the days before the catastrophe of Jerusalem.
But it is not necessary to refer them to it. For at the point which we have now reached, we may consider that our Lord is principally occupied, as it seems, in preparing the minds of the faithful for the Last Day, and in urging them by one consideration after another to keep themselves in a state of readiness for the coming of the Judge.
It has already been said that there is an obvious reason for this. The Day of Judgment may or may not be far distant, and our Lord expressly discourages anything like prying into the secrets of God in this respect.
But the Day of Judgment, considered not as the end of the world, but as the end of the period of probation to every single soul, is as far off, and no further, from that single soul than the moment of death.
Thus the practical matter for each individual soul is to be prepared for the moment of death. If a man die the day before the Day of Judgment, it is the same to him, if he be well prepared, as if he died centuries before that day; and in the same way, if a man dies centuries before, he is none the better off, if he die unprepared, than if he were to be living up to the Day of Judgment.
We find it difficult to persuade ourselves of this truth, at the same time that it is a truth which it would be most unreasonable to question. The reason why we find it so difficult to realise it is the occupation of our minds by temporal and worldly matters which meet the senses.
We have, therefore, always need of our Lord’s gracious warning. There is no one who has not need of it and is not perpetually tempted to forget it.
Heedlessness in the latter days
‘And take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly. For as a snare shall it come upon all that sit in the face of the whole earth.’
Scripture usually describes the Day of Judgment as coming as a thief in the night, or a snare.
There is no doubt that the prophecies lead us to expect that the days before the Judgment will be times of great material indulgence, great luxury, and forgetfulness of God and of religion. Men will have persuaded themselves that the warnings of conscience are mere fancies, that the existence of anything that is not material is a chimera, that there is no future life, no retribution for good or evil.
It may seem very extraordinary that there are to be so many signs preceding that Great Day, and that yet the majority of men, as far as we can gather from the predictions, are to be so entirely immersed in sensual, or at least sensible, enjoyments. But the explanation may probably be found in two circumstances.
The first is that already mentioned, the great prevalence of unbelief in anything but materialism, and the second is the fact which is attested by experience, that at the times of great visitations, plagues, pestilences, famines, and the like, there is always a recklessness and despair developed among certain minds which draws them to excess in the temporal pleasures in which alone they believe, in the spirit of the saying which St. Paul quotes when he says, ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’
This is quite in accordance with the passage from the Book of Wisdom which has already been quoted in a recent chapter. The one security for readiness, whether for the day of death, or the Day of Judgment, is that which our Lord gives:
‘Watch ye therefore, praying at all times, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are to come, and to stand before the Son of Man.’