Look To The End

Look To The End

 Thirty-Fourth Week of Year II     Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The Responsorial Psalm teaches us to focus: “Great and wonderful are your works” (Revelation 15:3 and Psalm 98).

Revelation 15: 1-4 focuses us on what we will see, feel and celebrate in heaven, when the victory of Jesus is complete. This is something we need to think about.

We get caught up in the immediate, the transitory, the secondary, much of which is ultimately trivial. Many issues we anguish over now will have no more importance to us then than a basketball game we lost in the seventh grade!

What should be important to us now? What should we be excited about?

One thing we tend to neglect is the importance of praising God. We talk more, think more, and emote more about some of the fantastic athletes we see on TV than we do about the glory of God! Teenagers can get turned on by singers. But how many — teenagers or adults — really get caught up in the words when we say or sing at Mass, “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty! Heaven and earth are full of your glory!” Yet this is the “song of the Lamb,” the song that will make us ecstatic in heaven:

“Mighty and wonderful are your works, Lord God Almighty! Right and true are your ways, O King of the nations!”

We mumble and mutter in the Gloria the same words we will be shouting at the top of our voices in heaven when we actually see how far beyond every other value and beauty God is: “You alone are holy!” No one compares.

When we finally see how right God was in his way of handling things on earth — how kind, how loving, how merciful, even when it appeared to us he was unfeeling of even unaware of our pain — we will find ourselves prostrate before him in admiration, gratitude and praise:All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.We need to give God now, while we can give it as our gift, the free choice of undoubting faith in him, of un-wavering trust, of un-waffling love. In Luke 21: 12-19 Jesus tells us that other people will put pressure on us to deny him:

They will… persecute you… hand you over to… prisons… kings and governors because of my name.

But what about the more general and (sometimes) more subtle ways we are pressured to deny Christ by our culture, our professional circle, our peer group? Aren’t we “handed over” to ridicule — often unspoken but still perceived — when our attitudes, values and behavior reveal our faith instead of reflecting the culture? Jesus says, “Don’t fear them. It will give you an opportunity to bear witness to me.” It will give us a chance to be faithful stewards of the faith confided in us. Initiative: Be Christ’s steward. Take seriously every chance to serve him.