Friday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

The Altar in Saint Meinrad
Archabbey Chapel

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

The former heaven and the former earth had passed away,
and the sea was no more.
I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God,
prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

There is a surprising number of fundamentalist Christians in the United States who take their literal reading of this passage as seriously as Catholics regard our literal reading of “Take and eat, this is my body.” Unfortunately they have no papal authority to define their belief as clearly as ours, and their ranks are deeply divided over a million different interpretations of the millennium. Broadly divided into two groups, pre-millenniums and post-millenniums; some expect the Reign of God to appear in our earthly, political experience. Others regard earthly life as already doomed and beyond the authority of grace; they say the end of history will come first and then God’s kingdom.

The Catholic Church has no official teaching on this “thousand years” of which Revelation speaks. We neither expect it to be an historical event, nor disregard its possibility. However, we expect the second coming of Jesus at any time, as we have for the last two thousand years. And, of course, we make plans for the future because it might be as important as the past.

Had I been a church historian, I would have written a book on the history of millennialism. If you have read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose you might have some idea of how rich and exciting that story is, and continues to be. It's fascination continues with the pot-boiler novels of the Left Behind series. 

Some have bemoaned the fact that Christianity was born out of Judaism at a moment when the ancient religion was pregnant with apocalyptic and messianic expectation. When else could it have happened? But we brought that first century Jewish anxiety and earnestness with us, as history and their philosophy took them elsewhere. 

Sometimes we get carried away with expectation. Christian Europe was rich with divine expectation when Columbus discovered America. Gutenberg invented the press and the Protestant reformation began around the same time. Change was in the air. Evangelical zeal drove gold-seeking explorers into the jungles of South America and the deserts of North America, followed by missionaries and colonists. They, in turn, wreaked havoc on the natives of both continents and the Caribbean Islands – a tragedy still seeking atonement.

And sometimes, in our expectation, we Christians get on each others’ nerves, as during the Protestant Reformation when Catholics and Protestants went at each other hammer and tong.  Long before Islam invented jihad, Christians were killing pagans and one another in the full expectation that heaven would reward them for their labor.

We cannot and should not try to temper the heat of our expectation, but we must learn to practice our spiritual warfare, our jihad, within our own hearts. There will be occasional millenniums -- lasting perhaps a thousand seconds, minutes, hours, or even a thousand tranquil days -- when we experience true inner peace. But during most of our lives we wait for God’s Kingdom by practicing penance, patience and charity toward all.