Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our friend and brother, Saint Paul, gives us a helpful reminder today in the office reading from the second letter to the Thessalonians. It looks like the Thessalonians were in danger of being convinced that the Day of the Lord had come and gone…and Paul was not having it.

Now, from the first chapter of the letter, it looks like the Thessalonians were experiencing some persecution and adversity, and it may be on that account that some were beginning to think the second coming, the end, had already happened. And while Paul attempts to correct this by indicating that certain signs had not yet been fulfilled (relating in particular to the rise of a Lawless One who’d behave much like the idolatrous and blasphemous tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the 2ndcentury BCE who sacrificed pigs to an idol he’d set up in the Temple), the gist of Paul’s message seems to be this: the Day of the Lord is not a day of lawlessness, sin, death! Insofar as these things are observable around you, they may indicate that the Day is near, but it hasn’t come—because the Day of the Lord will be an utter end to lawlessness, sin and death! Those things won’t exist on and after the Day when Jesus’ victory over them is fully manifested, when the coming Kingdom has arrived in its awesome wholeness. The Day of the Lord will be a Day of Justice, not a Day of Lawlessness. The days of lawlessness are, in fact, numbered.

Paul’s reminder about the coming Day is a good one for us to keep in mind. Because both adversity and prosperity can lead us to believe that we’ve reached the End: adversity can exhaust and oppress us into believing that the worst has arrived, and prosperity can lull us into thinking that nothing better could possibly be on the horizon, even as we see others around us (to whom we are accountable as images of God and siblings in Jesus Christ) who have no share in that prosperity.

But God has something indescribably better planned for us, a reality of grace that surpasses our wildest imaginings of the good, a reality of love to which we would do well to make ourselves available! There will come a Day when God’s victory over sin and death on the cross and in the resurrection is revealed in all of its fullness throughout all of creation; when all things will be brought, at last, to their perfection in holiness and in love; when justice will tumble down from the Throne of God in a flash-flood cataract that will wash sin and death away with all of our false notions and idols of prosperity, even as it nourishes, bathes, heals, restores, baptizes all of creation thirsty for righteousness. And this Day isn’t just for some, but for all: because God desires for all of us precisely what God desires for Godself—God. And God will remove from us and from this world anything and everything that gets in the way of the fullness of this gift of God’s infinite fullness being received by our finite creatureliness.

And what an image we get of this gift in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ! Not only because Jesus has taken the fullness of our humanity into the fullness of his divinity so that his divinity could be ours as our humanity is his…but because the image of this giving and receiving, the infant God-Man, placed in humanity’s arms, in our Our Lady’s arms, in our own arms, says to us in no uncertain terms, “Look! I am yours and you are mine! Look! The Light of the Day’s Fullness is dawning—and you, even you, can be flooded with the Dawnlight!”

Beloved, the mystery of lawlessness may be working itself out in the world, exhausting and dissipating itself even as it does…and insofar as it does, we know the Day has not fully arrived. But we know, too, that the Mystery of Love is also already at work, that this Mystery has come to us as one of us, that the night is far spent and the Day is at hand, that this Mystery of Love Incomprehensible is leading us into that new Day on which the Sun of Righteousness will never set.

Dear Friend, even as we know the Day has not yet come, let us today receive the grace to see how the Day is dawning nonetheless; how the shadows are even now being banished; how the Daystar rises in our hearts and makes us heralds of the Dawn this Advent season.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+