Tuesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 504

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/112712.cfm

MN State Fair
2012

Then another angel came from the altar, who was in charge of the fire,
and cried out in a loud voice
to the one who had the sharp sickle,
"Use your sharp sickle and cut the clusters from the earth's vines,
for its grapes are ripe."
So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth's vintage.
He threw it into the great wine press of God's fury.

American culture was at one time profoundly influenced by the scriptures. If the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock and the pioneers who traveled west had any book at all, it was the King James Bible. Children learned to read by the Book, and searched its pages for imaginative experiences. They were as familiar with the Deluge, David's sling and Saint Michael's angelic hosts as children might be familiar with whatever passes for entertainment today. They knew "where the Grapes of Wrath are stored" and "his terrible swift sword." 
They learned they were accountable to God for their thoughts, words and deeds, and that a Day of Judgement would come. 

Unfortunately, they probably did not get the liturgical references of passages like the one above, from the Book of Revelation. Nor would Catholics catch the allusions to the "cup of suffering" which Jesus drank, because they were never invited to share the chalice at Mass. They would not understand that Jesus' disciples must also drink the "blood of the grape" which flows from the "great wine press of God's fury." Where Jesus has gone, we must follow. 

Eventually, as the Catholics built their churches and painted the ceilings and apses, they would see Christ upon his throne, beneath the Authority of God the Father and accompanied by the Holy Spirit: 

I, John, looked and there was a white cloud,and sitting on the cloud one who looked like a son of man,with a gold crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.

Those images are still familiar to us, though the Lord might be holding a scepter or a shepherd's crook in his hand. The sharp sickle (or scythe) generally appears only in comics nowadays, in the hand of shrouded, hooded Death; or on December 31, as the old year departs. 

Having celebrated the Feast of Christ the King last Sunday, and now anticipating the First Sunday of Advent, we pass these darkening days of November remembering that all things are passing. All must come to judgement, and those who sustained their hope for salvation in the Day of Wrath will be delivered. 

Echoing Dante's vision of the dead, whose spirits floated about in an endless tempest of their own passions, T.S. Eliot wrote:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. 

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. 

It is a vision less violent than Revelation 14 but nonetheless disappointing. Christians pray daily and hopefully for deliverance from the futility of death, to God the Father and to Mary Full of Grace:

Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil...

Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death. Amen