The End Times and the Unchanging Hope

Julián Carrón - There is no complete life proposal that is not forced to deal with how it conceives, even the end of the story. This is also true for Jesus. He does not shy away from revealing what his vision of the end times is. To describe them, he uses a way of speaking that is very familiar to his listeners. In times of persecution, Jews were forced to communicate in code, using a particular literary genre, called apocalyptic, to avoid detection by their persecutors. In Greek, apokalypsis means "revelation."

Through this language, which was not always easy to understand because of the symbolic imagery, they sought to encourage people to persevere in faith, promising that God will triumph in the end. Jesus also uses this literary genre to describe the end times, taking it from the prophets. We saw the prophet -- in the Book of Daniel, a precisely apocalyptic book -- describe the last times as a "time of distress, such as there had never been since the rising of the nations until that time." "In those days [Jesus says], after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, the moon will no longer give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken."

But in the midst of these shocking signs, what prevails is His Person. "Then they will see the Son of Man [i.e., Jesus], coming on the clouds of heaven with great power and glory." It is He, the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, the one announced by the prophets, who will be revealed in all His power at the end of history. It is His person who is the unshakable foundation in the midst of the turbulence of life and History.

What is its mission? As we have heard, to gather those who have remained faithful to the end. "He will send angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of heaven." With this revelation of his coming, Jesus invites his followers to persevere in faith, in peace, confident that in the end he will save the elect.

So Jesus assures them in his own words, "Heaven and earth will pass away [there may be upheavals, like those in apocalyptic language], but my words will not pass away."

While Jesus is peremptory with these statements, the same does not happen with the description of the details of the end times: "As for that day and hour, however, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, except the Father."

This statement by Jesus is valuable because it makes us understand what his certainty about the end rests on. The foundation of it is not analytical knowledge of the day and the hour-as we so often wish, as an answer to our curiosity-but a relationship.

Jesus lives entrusted to a relationship much more solid than knowledge of details: just as a child does not need to know all the details of anything to be certain, familiarity with his father and mother is enough. In this way, he shows us that it is not by responding to our curiosity that we can have greater certainty in dealing with the upheavals of recent times, but by increasing our relationship with him.

"But is Jesus [there may come the question] credible? Can we trust His word?" Like the child with his mother: only when the child has seen his mother's gestures many times can he not doubt her, whatever upheaval may happen in life. We can only answer the question about her credibility if in the time of life we have grown in this familiarity with Jesus, like the familiarity Jesus has with the Father, to the point where we too have, his assurance.

When Jesus spoke these words, he had not yet gone through his passion and death, nor had he experienced his resurrection. It is this event, which the disciples later witnessed, that forms the ultimate foundation of their hope and thus of Jesus' credibility. That Jesus, who had promised that he would rise again after his passion and death, fulfilled his promise with his resurrection. He has a word that is fulfilled, so we too can believe in the fulfillment of his words about the end of time.

But we who have not witnessed his resurrection, how can we trust? We can only be certain by experiencing a life that would not be possible without Christ's resurrection. What is this life? "A life that is fully life and therefore is removed from death, but which can, in fact, begin already in this world, indeed, must begin in this world: only if [we can experience now and live already in this new life] do we learn that life which death cannot take away, [and only for this] makes the promise of eternity make sense" (Benedict XVI). And it will also be credible for us, not only because of what we will see, but because of what we already see — now.
The author still needs to revise its translation.
English. Italian. French. German.