Today is the next to the last Sunday before the end of the Church year and, as we have seen over the last few weeks, the readings all have to do with the end-times. And that is what all of these mysterious lines are about today, even this strange thing from 2 Thessalonians. In the letter, Paul is not talking about Mike Harris’ social programs: - "If they do not work, do not let them eat". Rather, the people who were involved here were people who expected Jesus to return, so they are literally sitting around just waiting for that event. And Paul says, "No. The life of the community has to go on. So you have to participate in it".

I think, it is universally agreed by most scholars, certainly by mainstream scholars at least, that Jesus really did preach the end of something. Now we have to figure out what the end was. Was it the end of the world, as I think most people used to think? That certainly is not the majority opinion today. Rather, the end that most people think that Jesus was talking about was the end of Judaism. Judaism as it was at that time and the beginning of the fullness of what Judaism was supposed to be: that the Jews believed that they were chosen by God in order to be the means of salvation for the entire world. That was the very reason for the existence of the Jews. But, of course, they had this terrible history where they were constantly being beat-up by everybody else. And so, not surprisingly, they drew the wagons in a circle and said, "No, what we have to do is create this little enclave of the Saved". So, instead of being open to everybody, some of the Jews tended to close in on themselves and say, "No, only a person is faithful to God who is circumcised and eating this kind of food and doing this sort of thing".

And Jesus, the Jew, was faithful to this original vocation of Judaism said, "No. You have to break down all those borders. You have to make sure that through you everybody knows that God is available to everybody". So Jesus eats with sinners, these people whom according to the good, pious Jews, you were not supposed to touch. Apparently Jesus was also very easy and familiar with women who, of course, were considered second-class citizens in a patriarchal society. And so all kinds of people who were shut out became Jesus’ partners. And this is, of course, what got him into trouble. But that would be the end; that would be the end of Judaism at this stage and the opening up of the Kingdom of God, and everybody in the world would not see each other through these lenses whereby we discriminate on all kinds of grounds against other people. But everybody could see their common humanity and respond to each other as human beings.

That famous Judgement scene in Matthew is an instance of this new community: "I was hungry and you fed me, in jail and you visited me, a stranger and you took me in". And these people were puzzled and he said, "as long as you were responsive to any human being, you were responsive to me, and that is the whole basis for judgement". This is a really important thing, especially for us in the Roman Church, because we do not have a very good history. We call ourselves the New Israel and then the whole Church, as it developed, was supposed to be the New Israel and we were supposed to do what many of the Jews of Jesus’ time had not done: be open to everybody. But we have not been open to everybody. If you look at the history of the Church, it has been a history of a series of exclusions. For example, we excluded black people from seminaries up until the 1940s. Women are still excluded in all kinds of ways. Now, we talk about the Jews as goddamned, godforsaken group of human beings that we could not care about.

I just finished a little piece yesterday that somebody asked me to write on the death of Matthew Shephard. Why was this poor guy in Wyoming tied to a fence in the middle of the bush and beaten to death by good Christians? Because he was homosexual. So, whom have we excluded? How faithful have we been as an institution to what we say we are supposed to be – the New Israel? So, the thoughts about the Judgement are a time to think about that for the Church but also, obviously, first of all, for ourselves. Whom do I exclude and on what grounds? What boundaries do I build around myself to protect myself? Because the end-time is, as I said, the demolition of all those boundaries. So that is the first thing about this end: whether it happens at the end of the world or whether it is supposed to be happening now. And clearly, Jesus thought it was supposed to be happening in his own lifetime because he behaved in such a way that it did happen, as a matter of fact. Precisely because of his behaviour, for example, when he invited everybody as his table companions, the kingdom was there. So, we are supposed to be prolonging that, whether for long distance or for short distance.

But then the other thing that is involved in these end-times is kind of implied in this third reading in which we get all of these ghastly images; the portents in the heavens- the sun getting dark and then the moon dripping blood – and wars, plagues, and catastrophes. What were they talking about in that language? They were talking about the fact that the end is going to be tough on some of us, and so they use this metaphorical language of all this great enormous upset. And then this passage from Malachi makes the issue even clearer because part of the end is judgement. We used to melodramatize this Judgement Day: the trumpets blasting, people being scared witless and all that other business, and Jesus coming with a big hairy finger pointed over us and saying, "You dirty rats!" No. That is infantile stuff. What is judgement at the end-time? It is not something that God imposes on us; it is simply that somehow we are clarified to see ourselves as we really are. The assessment, therefore, is a self-assessment. God will somehow enable us, in ways that is God’s problem, not mine, to see all of our dodges, fakery, evasions, and cowardice and how much of our own insecurities we have played out in the world in order to keep ourselves from each other. That is judgement, so that we really know who we are with the clarity that we do not have right now. And that, of course, leads to the final stage of things with everybody going to see who everybody else is and, therefore, everybody can really be loved as they truly are, instead of all of this fancy footwork we do to impress each other. We will not have to impress each other.

But this stuff has to have some kind of current relevance. And what does that mean. Well, it means that we ought to try to live as consciously as possible namely, to know why we do what we do. For a few millennia, people have been saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. On the face of it, this statement makes a certain amount of sense, but there is a specifically Christian sense of that too in that God is calling us to freedom. God is calling us to full possession of ourselves. God is calling us to maturity, to use the language of today, to self-determination. But you cannot do that if you do not live reflectively. You cannot have your life lived for you, as so many of us are tempted to do so much of the time – I certainly am. I turn on the television, listen to my favourite newscasters, or I read my favourite theologians and I just play out this script that somebody has written for me, and then I do not have to think about myself too much.

I think that self-reflection is difficult. Currently, there is so much noise in our world that nobody wants to take the time to do it, and it does take time; it does not happen automatically. There is not a little gauge, like a speedometer in a car, that will inform us as to where we are. No. You have to sit and really look at yourself. I have to figure out, "Why, Trojcak, are you doing what you are doing?" I have to do this with a view, therefore, to see how far I am from the Kingdom, or how close insofar as I can make judgements like that.

So, as always, this stuff is a little intimidating. But on the other side of this stuff, of course, is real freedom, real maturity, the real Kingdom of God and all this good stuff that we say that we really want.