The First Sunday of Advent, November 27, 2022

Matthew 24, 37–44

Jesus said to his disciples: “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”

“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”  We all go through shocks in which the seemingly impossible has suddenly occurred: a sudden death or terminal diagnosis, the loss of a long-held job.  We think to ourselves that this was not supposed to happen.  So was the shock of what the Lord was telling his disciples about the end of the world, which they thought he meant would happen within their lifetimes.  Decidedly, this was not supposed to happen.  The kingdom of Israel was supposed to be reestablished long before any judgment.  But the man who healed the blind and the lame, who drove out demons and raised the dead, was speaking.  The Lord’s reference to the “days of Noah” had special significance: the first end of the world was brought on by the excessive sinfulness of the people of the earth.  Their behavior became so extreme that the author of Genesis remarked that God “regretted” creating the world.  Only a few people were saved.  

“Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left.”  Certain Protestant groups interpret this as what will happen during  the rapture”, a doctrine the Lord most certainly did not teach and which only was thought up around the year 1900.  The Lord uses a figure here in order to show the suddenness of his return to judge the living and the dead.  Two men near each other will be engaged in work and one “will be taken” while the other has no idea what has happened.  

We might wonder what will be the timeline of the final days before the end and what will happen then.  In the years before the end, a great persecution waged by the Antichrist and his followers will put Christians to death throughout the world.  It will be worse than any persecution the Church has ever suffered.  It will end rather suddenly when the Antichrist is killed, either by St. Michael or by the Lord.  An early transition has it that the Lord Jesus will kill him on the summit of Mount Sinai.  Following that will come a short time of peace during which the Jews will convert to the Faith.  And then the End will come.  In an instant, the Lord will come in glory on the clouds with his angels.  All alive at that time will see him no matter where they are on the earth.  In the same instant, the dead will rise.  Angels will reconstitute the bodies of the deceased, these will be joined again to their souls, and they bodies will be glorified, that is, spiritualized and made immortal.  Those alive at the time of the Lord’s coming will die in that same instant and will then be raised again, for we must all die.  The Angels will separate the just from the wicked in front of the Lord.  And then all the people who ever lived will be shown their good deeds and their sins; the results of their decisions and what would have happened if they had decided otherwise.  Saints will see how nearly they could have become the worst of sinners, and the wicked will see how they might have become great saints.  Various traditions locate this judgment in various places.  Through the Prophet Joel, Almighty God said: “Let them arise, and let the nations come up into the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there I will sit to judge all nations round about” (Joel 3, 12).  This is a valley in Israel near Jerusalem.  This would accord with the tradition that the Lord will appear over Jerusalem.  

The Last Judgment will provide not so much a judgment, though, as a public sentencing, for each person will be judged for his or her deeds upon death and will go straightway to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory.  The purpose of the judgment, then, is to manifest the perfect justice of God, which redounds to his glory.  The righteous will hardly believe that the Lord has declared them to be so because of the immensity of the reward they receive for comparatively little work in such a brief time;  the wicked will cry out in despair, unwilling to believe that they could have been so wicked as to deserve their dire fate.