Before it’s too late …

Sooner or later, when our earthly pilgrimage comes to an end, will we be ready for our own encounter with the judgment of God?

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger

The urgency of time strikes differently for different cohorts. Eight-year-olds will balk at waiting one more minute for the cake to come out. Eighty-year-olds will be more than happy to wait 10 years for another birthday. Time, like beauty, is much conditioned by the eyes and experience of the beholder.

“Oh, where has the time gone?” This is a common lament heard as we cascade into Thanksgiving, already having seen and heard some all-too-soon hints of Christmas as I did in Detroit last Sunday while changing flights in a terminal hustling into the next season’s festive mode with holiday musical strains matching the décor, but a little too soon.

That same morning, I had celebrated Mass at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Green Bay, Wis., to which I made a pilgrimage with our two seminarians studying at the Seminary of St. Francis de Sales in Milwaukee. I was there to celebrate the Ministry of Acolyte to which one of them along with their class were welcomed the day before.

The shrine was beautiful in its simplicity, nestled between two dairy farms, commemorating the only officially confirmed Marian apparition of Our Lady in America to a simple Belgian immigrant, Adele Brise. As with all visits I have made to Marian shrines, I felt the peace Mary brings and the soothing sense of her presence.

The Gospel on which I preached at the 11 a.m. Mass at the shrine that morning, however, was not one of rest and consolation. Again, I had been surprised by the reality that it was the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary time, the last of the liturgical year before the Solemnity of Christ the King this week. Where had the year gone?

The readings — as are usual for that Sunday (particularly Mk 13:24-32) — spoke of the end of the world as we know it, of the sun being darkened and the moon no longer giving its light. I assured my congregation that the apocalyptic character of this Gospel was not a prediction of anything likely to happen tomorrow. In fact, if nature runs its course, the sun will not run out of the hydrogen that fuels its powerful atomic fusion for another five billion years. Even then, it will take another billion years to flare out, at which time any extant earthlings will feel the burn — but again, this is not something that need terrify us at the moment. That said, there is a message here not to be missed as we may be tempted to anesthetize ourselves from the urgency of the narrative. That final moment in time for each and every one of us will not fall in some future millennium but in the course of our lifetime, the remaining days of which none of us can be certain, for we know “neither the day not the hour” (Mt 25:13).

Jesus is warning us of the urgency of our own moment in time, which may be sooner than we might imagine. At that moment, sooner or later, in which our earthly pilgrimage comes to an end, will we be ready for our own encounter with the judgment of God? What will be our account for how we spent our days on earth, for the Lord will be demanding from each of us a reckoning?

As the liturgical year comes to end, we are offered an opportunity to get a head start on the new year. Typically, many people make New Year’s resolutions as the new calendar year approaches, not all of them with an aura of sobriety. We can get a jump on the next year by coming to our senses and acknowledging those areas of our lives that are in need of reform and realignment … before it’s too late.

Time left for us to make those changes in our lives is not without limits. I must confess that even as I am growing older, I still find it tempting sometimes to put off to another day — or year — things that I know ought not be postponed. A long deferred medical procedure a few years ago almost cost me my life when I learned in the nick of time that a cancer diagnosis required immediate surgery. 

This was just one more reminder to me of the times I had thought I had another day to tend to a request or a demand for my presence that I felt could wait a little longer while I took care of my own business. More than once I have regretted the sick call I did not respond to immediately only to learn the soul who sought my priestly anointing expired hours or even minutes before I finally arrived at their deathbed. Sometimes, regrettably, I have come to learn, it is just too late!

At the end of this liturgical year, even as the Gospel deploys images of the end of the world as if it might actually be imminent, I must ask myself am I really putting Jesus at the center of my life, acknowledging him as the only Lord of my life who deserves to be enthroned on the seat of my heart? 

This Sunday we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the year before we enter the Advent season. I hope you will join with me in counting the blessings of the year that we have just passed with the precious time God has granted us with the grace to be yet alive on this earth. I will be praying for you — and I know and trust you will pray for me — that as we enter the new year, a Holy Year of Hope that is soon to commence, we will resolve to treasure each precious moment as an incident to be cherished with reverence and gratitude, a privileged reprieve from the time we may have wasted in the past in order to be more attentive, more responsive to the God of love breaking into our lives, whose Sacred Heart aches for our “yes” to the press of his most generous blessings.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” So reads the admonition of St. Paul (Rm 8:31), which we can accept as an encouragement, inciting our hope in the good things yet to come. It is true that God is on our side, if only we will resolve not to resist his love. There is nothing to fear at all, if we will only say “yes” to him now … before it is too late.

 @AlbanyDiocese