These readings today which we have just heard seem to refer in their various ways to the end of the world, and one of their messages is, how fruitless and futile it is to speculate on when and how this may come about. St Paul is very down to earth in his letter to his converts in Thessaloniki, telling them to put their minds and their energies into living now, rather than into worrying about some possible cataclysmic event in the future- he says they should “go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat”- that is, being productive members of the Church and of society. And Our Lord too speaks in similar vein, when, at the end of his rather grim predictions of what life will be like for his followers in the years leading up to the destruction of the Temple, he ends by saying “your endurance will win you your lives”. We are being told today in our Scripture readings to “go on quietly working” and to endure, to stick at our Christian vocation.
I have said before that although we cannot be sure about when the end of the world will come, we can be quite sure about one thing, that the world will end for us, that one day my world will end, that I will one day die and be here no more. What awaits us beyond the grave? And how can we prepare for it? To try to answer those important questions I want to use the wise words of two of our greatest saints.
St Thérèse of Lisieux knew for a long time that she was terminally ill and reflected a great deal, especially in her last months, on what the after-life would involve. In one of her prayers she uses a memorable phrase, when she speaks of eternal life as being like a constant conversation we will be holding with Our Lord, caught up, as she puts it, in an eternal face-to-face. We shall see Our Lord face to face, and be held by his loving gaze. It will be like two lovers meeting who have been apart for a long time, the sort of meeting you might see at a railway station or an airport, when they run to embrace each other at the barrier, and in the intensity of their emotions have no words to say, they just are lost in looking at the one they love. St Thérèse says that once all the things that get in the way of our loving Our Lord have vanished, what she calls the shadows, that is to say, all the passions and desires we have for material things, for the things of this world, the things that so easily cloud our vision and sidetrack our thoughts, once all that has gone, we shall be able to concentrate on our love, the love that we always knew was there, the love that we sometimes glimpsed in ourselves, the love we have for Our Lord- then, she says, “I will be able to talk to you of my love in an eternal face-to-face” –“vous redire mon Amour dans un Face à Face éternel!” In death she imagines that her soul will “throw itself….into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love”.
Now we are not, I suspect, Christians of the stature of St Thérèse! We may be thinking, how far we are from feeling ready to throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus in this way. The whole idea of an encounter at this level of intimacy with God may seem quite beyond us, may be making us squirm and feel very uncomfortable. How can we ever hope to approach death with that kind of confidence? Well, now I turn to another great favourite of mine, St Augustine! Only this week I read this, from one of the sermons he gave to his congregation in North Africa all those centuries ago: “Let us choose every day to know who we really are in case, while we are without a care in the world, the Day arrives at last, and, of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real.” Let us think about that a minute. St Augustine is saying that the only way to be ready for death when it comes, the Day with a capital D, our D-Day that will finally liberate us from this world and the tyranny of sin, the only way to prepare for death is to be real now - not to hide behind falsehoods, a false perhaps rose-tinted view of ourselves, not to start to believe all the half truths about ourselves that we often present to the outside world, you know what I mean, the version of events that we put across when we describe ourselves to new people when we meet them, that ensures they think well of us- no, hard though it is, St Augustine recommends that the best thing, the safest course in the long run, is for us to stick to the truth about ourselves, to deal with the realities of who we really are and what our lives are really like. This is, I think, what the endurance Jesus speaks of means- if we can hold on through our lives to a version of ourselves that is more or less accurate, that if our version of who we think we are isn’t that too far from God’s version of who we are, then we will be in with a chance, and then our meeting with Our Lord at the end of our lives will not be too painful, too awkward to contemplate. If we have faced up to the truth, we will find we can face the one who said “I am the Truth”. God forbid that we die believing in all our fantasies, and so adrift from the reality of our lives and our true selves that “of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real”.
I have wandered far from our texts, but I hope you see the link I am trying to make- that our big chance for eternal happiness lies in our living now, “going quietly on” as St Paul says, embedded in the reality of who we really are. Help us, Lord Jesus, to be among those whose endurance will win them their lives, so that on the Last day we may stand with confidence before you, the Son of Man, and spend our eternity with you, telling you our love face to face. Amen.
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