A Time Unsurpassed in Distress

Today’s reflection is by Bondings 2.0 contributor Michaelangelo Allocca.

Today’s liturgical readings for the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time are available here.

Full disclosure: I love today’s readings because they include one of the few times my first name appears in scripture: “At that time there shall arise Michael, the great prince, guardian of your people …” (Daniel 12:1).

A more important full disclosure: although you are reading this post after November 5th, I am writing it before the election. Whatever the outcome, I think we can safely call this period “a time unsurpassed in distress,” in the words of today’s first reading. Even the most irritatingly placid people I know have been operating at peak levels of stress since about Labor Day. Although many besides we LGBTQ folk have cause for alarm, there is much truth in a quote I’ve seen many times over the last few weeks: “If you don’t understand why your gay friend is worried right now, you don’t have a gay friend: you just know a gay person.”

And although when you read this you will know whether your stress was justified or not, and has been relieved or not, the anxious contemporary mood about coming events is entirely consonant with the typically apocalyptic readings of the closing of the liturgical year as we approach Advent.

The apocalyptic visions shared today by both the prophet Daniel in the first reading and by Jesus in the gospel are relevant and instructive. The lectionary’s placement of these readings at the end of what we call “Ordinary Time” (which ends next Sunday, the feast of Christ the King) teaches us about the literal end of our “ordinary time.” The “kingdom of God” taught by Jesus refers not only to a future which follows our present, but to the coming of God’s own special time, kairos, to replace the “ordinary” calendar/clock time, chronos. And so the disturbing images always contain bright promises as well: it is the job of prophecy to speak hope into horror, to bring Eternity crashing into the everyday.

The beauty of hopeful promises in scripture is that they are not “just be patient through your present unpleasantness: you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” They promise that in God’s real time (kairos), the justice already seen in the prophets is the sign of God’s victory. Daniel makes clear that the righteous among us are now our light and hope: “But the wise shall shine brightly / like the splendor of the firmament, / and those who lead the many to justice / shall be like the stars forever.” Whatever evil and oppression now darken our view, in kairos, Marsha P. Johnson shines brightly; Harvey Milk is like the splendor of the firmament; and Fr. Mychal Judge, OFM, is like the stars forever.

In the apocalyptic preaching found in today’s gospel, Jesus continues and echoes the prophetic vision of Daniel, in a vividly personal way. His statement “the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory” quotes the prophet, and it points both backward and forward: back to the scripture He invokes, and ahead to His own personal “time of tribulation.” It’s a reminder that kairos is not like our ordinary time. We can reasonably assume that when He preached these words, Jesus knew what was coming very soon for Him. These words underline His knowledge and acceptance of what was to come: during His trial, when asked if He was the Messiah, He said yes, and then repeated this quote from Daniel, knowing full well it would seal His death sentence.

We can also assume that He was strengthened by the prophetic promise He pronounces, that “… then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds” (again, in God’s kairos, not our chronos).  Scattered to the four winds as they might be at the moment, there are elect (Mychal, Harvey, Marsha, Bayard Rustin, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and many others both well-known and anonymous), and God will send out angels to gather them.

The final puzzling bit of promise in Jesus’s words today is “Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” The truth in these words is not literal but prophetic truth, and again, refers to kairos, not chronos. There was much confusion in the early Church when people took such words literally: some of Paul’s letters convey the clear sense that he and his congregations expected Jesus to return at lunchtime next Tuesday. But the truth in Jesus’s words is that the “day and hour” of God’s time is now, wherever the righteous shine like the stars , not in some “farther along” or “sweet by and by.”  Let us always remember that, whether we are seeing tribulation or triumph in the daily headlines.

—Michaelangelo Allocca (he/him), New Ways Ministry, November 17, 2024