debate

The End of the World

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

Recently I met a man who was in the hospital for heart surgery. Being myself a confirmed cowardly hypochondriac, I congratulated him for his courage and confidence facing the dangerous operation. He replied, “It isn’t a matter of courage. It’s called faith. I’m in the hands of Christ.” In any case, he said, Christ was about to return, since all the signs pointed to it. He was expecting what some call the Rapture, when the elect will presumably be taken up to be with Christ for the last stage in world history. He thought the Rapture might occur during his operation. (If I believed in the Rapture, I would have been worried that my surgeon and/or my anesthesiologist might be taken up, leaving me in the hands of all the sinful medical students and nurses.)

Indeed, many Christians (including an increasing number of Catholics) are thinking about the end of the world all the time. Wars and “rumors of wars,” plagues, natural disasters, terrorism, and other violence unleashed against a great number of innocent people, among other travesties,–all seem to fulfill what Scripture says are the signs of the end. From the last Sunday in Ordinary Time through the first weeks of Advent, the Church’s liturgy directs our attention to the “end of the world” and the “Second Coming” of Christ. After Christmas, when the civil year ends and a new one begins, we are conscious of the relentless passage of time, wondering what the future holds in store for us.

What do we learn about the “end of the world” from the Church’s perception of its link with the mystery of Christmas?

If by the word “world “ we mean God’s creation, then we must say that it will never cease to exist. Instead, it will reach the destiny intended for it from the beginning. Creation will not disappear into nothingness because the world we know, the world of which we are a part, the cosmos that has reached self-consciousness and freedom in us, has Jesus Christ at its origin, center, and destiny. It has always been oriented to a fulfillment by means of Christ’s humanity.

In a sense, the creation of this world is the first “moment” of the Incarnation. In more precise theological terms, in the “fullness of time,” in Mary’s womb, the eternal mission of the Son within the mystery of the Trinity became one with the incarnate mission of Mary’s Son. “To come forth [the generation of the Son from the Father] and to come [into the world] became thus one single action and movement. The internal mission [the Son’s identity within the Trinity] and the external mission [as incarnate in the world] are one” (cf “The Last Act,” Volume 5 of von Balthasar’s Theodrama). The “end” of the world as we know it, that is, creation’s destiny, has already entered into our present history. That is why meditation on the end of the world is most appropriate as preparation for the celebration of Christmas.

This end, however, is not really something that just “happens” to us, as in the middle of surgery. Rather, the end is present as an invitation to our freedom. Creation will not reach its destiny without our freedom, liberated from its enslavement of sin and empowered by our belonging to the network of inter-personal relations that form the Church as a communion in freedom. The life of the Church is the presence in this world of the “end” or destiny of the world. The highest expression of this freedom is prayer, the free self-abandonment to God’s love. Prayer is the door to the “new heaven and new earth” born of the mission of Christ in the world: to “make all things new.” There is no other Rapture but that of prayer.

The little span of time that is our present life is given to us so that we can freely abandon ourselves to the eternal life offered to us through Christ. Through it, eternity enters the present, and the “other world” (as Father Giussani calls the life of grace) is revealed, and experienced as the ultimate truth and meaning of this world and our time in it. Without this experience of liberation through communion in Christ now, all ideas about the end of the world remain what von Balthasar calls “abstract wishful thinking,” with no real power to sustain our hope in the midst of the present destruction.