The Last Things and the Last Days

1 Thessalonians 5:1-6:

But as to the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.

As the Church approaches the end of the Liturgical Year, we begin to see Sunday readings that remind us of...well...the End. We see it not only in today's Epistle, St. Paul's warning to the Thessalonians that "the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night," but also in today's Gospel. We can take all kinds of good lessons about the Christian life from the parable of the talents, but it is also an apocalyptic parable-a warning from the Lord of what might happen if "the Master of the House" returns to find that his servants haven't made use of the talents they are given. We see an even more stark vision of the same theme in next Sunday's Gospel, when Jesus gives us a vision of the Last Judgment, when we will be asked what we have done for the Least of These...the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, those in prison...We are warned that those who have ignored these brothers and sisters will be called workers of iniquity, and will be told to depart from the presence of the Lord for all eternity. We would all do well to remember that warning.

The Church in her wisdom calls our attention to the End of Days as she prepares to mark the time with the end of one Year of Grace and the beginning-on the First Sunday of Advent-of another. It is a reminder to us that both our individual time and the time of the whole human race in this universe of God's Creation is finite-both our life and the life of this present world as we know it will eventually come to an end.

A lot of Catholics may not realize that the Church does have a few things to say about the Last Days, and one of these things may surprise some-and it comes right out of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and is rooted in a longstanding belief which goes back to apostolic times:

675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.⁵⁷⁴ The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth⁵⁷⁵ will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.⁵⁷⁶
 
676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,⁵⁷⁷ especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.⁵⁷⁸

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.⁵⁷⁹ The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.⁵⁸⁰ God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.⁵⁸¹

I'm not including all of the relevant footnotes here only because of space and time (this entry has already taken me quite some time to compose), but we see that the Church teaches that there is such a thing as the Antichrist, that will become apparent as part of the Church's final trial in this world before the end of the world as we know it. We as Catholics may find that strange because we don't talk about this much, but more so because more false doctrine and deception swirls around this idea of Antichrist and the End of Days than around anything else in Scripture. The earliest believers expected the appearance of the Antichrist, and were warned in 1 John 4:2-3:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God,  and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already.

The early Christians were told that while they were busy expecting the Antichrist to show up as some sign of the end (which they expected at any minute) that the spirit of antichrist-the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh and is the Son of God-is already with them. This seems to be an apostolic shot across the bow against running around declaring the end to be near and that the Antichrist is about to show up-just go about your life but watch and be ready, the things the apostles shared with you could happen at any time.

It is noteworthy that the Church has chosen not to go into great detail about the Antichrist and the last things in the Catechism other than what I cited above. We also aren't told specifically whether the Antichrist will be a person or a system of things that puts itself in place of God, but it does seem to be far more systemic than personal based on what the Church tells us above. One thing we do know is that throughout history, believers in Christ have never been removed from the possibility of persecution. Hence, the idea that Christians are going to undergo a "Rapture" (or as I call it, the Rupture) and be removed from the final trials of this present world is directly contrary to Scripture and the constant teaching of the Church. Persecution-and even death-has long been seen as the ultimate test of the Faith (Matthew 24:9). Indeed, the very idea of "the Rapture" as today's fundamentalists understand it is an invented doctrine with no roots in apostolic times which can trace it's roots to 19th Century American fundamentalist Protestant theologians, not the Apostles.

There is also the negativity and fear that seems to surround discussion of end times thought among those with a more fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture or eschatology-its a kind of "repent and believe in our way or Jesus is going to get you when He comes back" sort of preaching. Note that you don't hear that quasi-panic coming from Catholic circles at all. This is because Holy Mother Church is 2,000 years old, and in virtually every age of the Church's history, people have tended to take the apocalyptic parts of Scripture and apply an interpretation-often quite reasonable for its time-to their own day.

In the first two centuries after the Apostles the Church underwent varying persecutions and believers took the Lord's warnings to mean that they would live to see the End of Days. During the time of Julian the Apostate, many Christians thought that the Lord's return was imminent. At the turn of the Second Millennium, a great many people believed that the world would not long endure and that Christ would soon appear. Belief in the imminent return of the Lord was quite prominent at various times during the Crusades, as well as when much of Christendom was ravaged by the Black Death. The terrible and bloody calamity of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648)-the real first "world war"-when the Western world was so bitterly divided between Catholic and Protestant (and from which some historians believe Christianity in Europe never fully recovered) had good people on both sides believing that the Lord was very near, and with good reason. Americans believed that our own War Between the States had apocalyptic significance, and doubtless for many Americans it did. Christians saw the First World War and the Second World War both as having significance in a prophetic way in determining that we were living in the Last Days. Good people thought the same thing with regard to the rise of Communism, the nuclear arms race, and the beginning of the Third Millennium.

Yet, we are still here and now well into three millenia Anno Domini. Does that mean that all of those centuries of Christians were wrong for believing that the events that they were witness to-unique in history and to their age-were signs of the Last Days? Perhaps none of them were wrong at all...

What is often missing when many of our fundamentalist or evangelical brethren discuss the end times is a sense of Divine Perspective. We may have been living in the "Last Days" for the last 2,000 years. As we are told in 2 Peter 3:8:

But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

 In other words, God doesn't measure time in the way that we do. We should be joyful that one day the Lord will return and the sorrows of this world will pass away...but we shouldn't obsess over how close we are to the very end...that is ultimately up to God to decide, and God alone.