Dear brothers and sisters,
“By your perseverance you will secure your lives.”
(Luke 21:19)
We have arrived in Jerusalem. We see here the end of Jesus journey unfold into a new beginning. Jesus’ road to Calvary ends violently but on the third day Jesus quietly rises like the morning sun and the New Day begins.
In Jesus’ own journey to Jerusalem, to His death, His burial, His descent into the realm of the dead, and His rising to New Life, we see the very pattern of our own lives revealed. The end times are but a sharing in Jesus’ own paschal mystery.
His passion and death and resurrection is His way of coming and judging the world and bringing all of His creation into the brilliant light of His Divine Life, to the fullness of life where there is neither death, nor corruption, nor mortality.
His journey has now penetrated and swallowed up the journey of each and every human being and all of creation and the cosmos. Jesus coming into our world has now imbued all existence.
Creation, the cosmos and all humanity in it, living and dead are now experiencing the effects of His birth, preaching, suffering, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. In the gospel, our Lord describes for us the things that will happen, things that are already happening as a result of His first coming.
All of the cosmos is groaning, quaking, drying up and falling as it too is being subjected to the saving power of its Creator. We hear Jesus describing this in today’s gospel, (Luke 19:11)
The temple as what was for a long time in Jerusalem the meeting place of man and God is destroyed and swallowed up into the very Real Temple that Jesus is, (Luke 19:6).
Humanity too is being subjected to its Creator’s suffering, death and resurrection and we have to choose to be saved and transformed by Him or refuse Him and choose to exist forever in a state of misery, a perpetual wailing and grinding of teeth.
So we can see that all the upheavals that are taking place at every level of existence, from the atomic to the cosmic and in all persons living and dead, all these upheavals are but the powerful mystery of the Risen One bringing into the realm of the divine all earthly existence.
Let us not resist Him who comes! Let us persevere in Him who is cleansing us and transforming us and all His creation into the Divine. Do not be afraid. – Fr. Simi.