Doomsday—Pretending it won't happen
Our Lord warns his followers to watch for his coming—and not to allow themselves to be distracted by the cares or pleasures of life.
Doomsday—Part III
In this chapter, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How burying heads in the sand is the special skill of our age
How we distract ourselves from the realities of life, death, and judgment
How even legitimate pleasures and cares can take on a life of their own.
Following his prophecies about Jerusalem's doom, Our Lord turns his attention more directly to the end of the world, making startling promises to his faithful.
This Gospel is read on the First Sunday of Advent. The following commentary deals with what comes immediately after that Gospel reading.
Advent is often thought of as the start of the new liturgical year, but as we can see, this Gospel reading flows seamlessly from that of the last Sunday of Pentecost-tide.
This is because Advent itself is not just ordered towards Christmas as the commemoration of Christ’s birth in the flesh, but also towards his Second Coming in Glory.
We have addressed some of the reasons for this, and how the Roman Liturgy presents this matter, below:
Other Parts:
Doomsday for the World
From
Passiontide—Part I
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1889, Ch. XIV, pp 272-8
St. Matt. xxiv. 29–36; St. Mark xiii. 24–34; St. Luke xxi. 25, 26;
Story of the Gospels, § 144, 5.
Sung on the First Sunday of Advent
Warnings of Our Lord
Our Lord goes on, as St. Luke tells us:
‘And take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly. For as a snare shall it come upon all that sit upon the face of the earth. Watch ye, therefore, praying at all times, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are to come, and to stand before the Son of Man.’
These words are capable of application to the earlier subject of the prophecy, the days before the catastrophe of Jerusalem.
But it is not necessary to refer them to it. For at the point which we have now reached, we may consider that our Lord is principally occupied, as it seems, in preparing the minds of the faithful for the Last Day, and in urging them by one consideration after another to keep themselves in a state of readiness for the coming of the Judge.
It has already been said that there is an obvious reason for this. The Day of Judgment may or may not be far distant, and our Lord expressly discourages anything like prying into the secrets of God in this respect.
But the Day of Judgment, considered not as the end of the world, but as the end of the period of probation to every single soul, is as far off, and no further, from that single soul than the moment of death.
Thus the practical matter for each individual soul is to be prepared for the moment of death. If a man die the day before the Day of Judgment, it is the same to him, if he be well prepared, as if he died centuries before that day; and in the same way, if a man dies centuries before, he is none the better off, if he die unprepared, than if he were to be living up to the Day of Judgment.
We find it difficult to persuade ourselves of this truth, at the same time that it is a truth which it would be most unreasonable to question. The reason why we find it so difficult to realise it is the occupation of our minds by temporal and worldly matters which meet the senses.
We have, therefore, always need of our Lord’s gracious warning. There is no one who has not need of it and is not perpetually tempted to forget it.
Heedlessness in the latter days
‘And take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly. For as a snare shall it come upon all that sit in the face of the whole earth.’
Scripture usually describes the Day of Judgment as coming as a thief in the night, or a snare.
There is no doubt that the prophecies lead us to expect that the days before the Judgment will be times of great material indulgence, great luxury, and forgetfulness of God and of religion. Men will have persuaded themselves that the warnings of conscience are mere fancies, that the existence of anything that is not material is a chimera, that there is no future life, no retribution for good or evil.
It may seem very extraordinary that there are to be so many signs preceding that Great Day, and that yet the majority of men, as far as we can gather from the predictions, are to be so entirely immersed in sensual, or at least sensible, enjoyments. But the explanation may probably be found in two circumstances.
The first is that already mentioned, the great prevalence of unbelief in anything but materialism, and the second is the fact which is attested by experience, that at the times of great visitations, plagues, pestilences, famines, and the like, there is always a recklessness and despair developed among certain minds which draws them to excess in the temporal pleasures in which alone they believe, in the spirit of the saying which St. Paul quotes when he says, ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’
This is quite in accordance with the passage from the Book of Wisdom which has already been quoted in a recent chapter. The one security for readiness, whether for the day of death, or the Day of Judgment, is that which our Lord gives:
‘Watch ye therefore, praying at all times, that you may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that are to come, and to stand before the Son of Man.’
‘Surfeiting and drunkenness’
It may seem surprising that our Lord should warn His Apostles, and through them His faithful children in all ages of the Church, against the particular faults which are here mentioned, as if the servants of God were likely to fall into ‘surfeiting and drunkenness,’ and cares of life.
It may be said, however, that the warning, being general, was necessarily put in such a form as to embrace all, and that the majority of Christians might be expected to be liable to such temptations, if the Apostles were not.
It is also true that an excess of indulgence in eating and drinking, and much more in devotion to secular cares, may be very ruinous indeed to spiritual men.
But the real answer seems to be found in the danger of these indulgences, even when they are not great, as benumbing the life of the soul and making it capable of the greatest falls into vices of all kinds for all sorts of people.
The word which is translated ‘surfeiting’ (crapula)1 seems to mean the effects of over-eating in heaviness and depression. It may be taken that our Lord means not so much to stigmatize vicious excess, as to put us on our guard against the effects of plentiful food and good cheer in unfitting us for the work we have to do and the dangers we have to meet.
Heedlessness as to the conditions under which we live in this world, with all the great issues of the future dependent upon us, is to many the greatest danger of all.
A life without privation, without check on the unsinful feeding of ourselves on the good things of this world, is not uncommon in Christians who do not care to aim higher than the avoidance of what is a breach of the Commandments, and is a sign of a state of soul that is unprovided for great trials and emergencies. Little more is needed to lull the soul to sleep.
People ask, ‘Is it wrong?’ and they are told it is not wrong. But they do not ask whether it is the kind of life which leaves the soul free to think of Heaven and provide for the Judgment Day, to be ready for death, and to practise virtue under very possible trials and dangers. St. Peter says:
‘Seeing then that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting to the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat.’
Kinds of intoxication
People who are looking forward to such things are not likely, if they are Christians, to be ‘too full of meat.’ Again, there may be a great deal more than is apparent in the caution against ‘drunkenness.’
Few people who profess to be serving God are likely to give way to drunkenness, for if they are not above so degrading a vice, they are not fit even to profess to serve Him. But there are different and manifold kinds of the habit of intoxication beyond that which commonly goes by the name.
We speak of men being intoxicated with pleasure, or ambition, or pride, and so with other bad principles, and our language is accurate, because it is as easy to lose our reasonable control over ourselves in such ways as in the more vulgar form of drinking.
Any exciting pursuit which is indulged to excess may result in intoxication. People are drunk with novel-reading, if the thoughts put into their heads by works of fiction fill their minds day and night, come in to prevent them from praying, if the pursuit occupies too much time, and interferes with and unfits them for their duties.
The same may be said of a score of other ways of enjoyment which are not so absolutely wrong as to be forbidden by any law of God, but which are often as ruinous to souls as if they were breaches of the Decalogue. Such are dancing, card-playing, and the thousand pursuits with which gambling is mixed up; such is the love of money, such are sometimes politics, or success in conversation or literature—in short, any amusement or employment which becomes an end to the soul, instead of being a means to the service of God.
The Scripture speaks of the love of money as idolatry, because it puts money before the heart as its god. The heart is infinitely foolish, and liable to be entangled in sensible and temporal things, and this is the same thing as to say that it is liable to a sense of intoxication. No wonder, therefore, that our Lord, with the dangers of the last days, and, indeed, of all days, before Him, should warn even Apostolic men to ‘take heed’ that their hearts be not overcharged.
The ‘cares of life’
It is quite easy to understand how the effect against which He warns them may be produced by what He calls ‘the cares of life.’ He does not mean cares that are evil in themselves. But the danger to most men, and certainly to many good men, is from cares which seem to them to be necessary, and which are greatly engrossing.
The seed in the parable fell among the thorns, as well as by the wayside and on the rocky ground, and as our Lord said, the ‘cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches’ choked it, and it became unfruitful. He seems to tell us that we are all in a condition of danger and warfare, in which many privations that would not otherwise be necessary must be embraced, in which there must be much self-denial and mortification, lest the day come upon us unawares when there will be no time to make our preparation.
Our condition is such that we require to be able to watch and pray continually, and the reward of our faithfulness to the requirements of this condition is that we shall be able to stand before the Son of Man in the Day of Judgment. But when watchfulness and prayer are required, there must of necessity be a life above the world, even if the vocation in which we find ourselves does not take us out of the world materially.
The soul without food
The habits against which He warns us are chiefly those in which watchfulness and prayer are either impaired or made impossible.
Our spiritual exercises are the food of the soul. If the body is deprived of its food, health and strength are impossible. But the body does not more certainly languish when its food is either denied it or is cut short, than does the soul when those exercises are made impossible on which its life and vigour depend.
Let us once be awakened to the state of things around us, the danger of sloth and spiritual slumber, the necessity of prayer and mortification and of the fruitful use of the means of grace, if we would escape the dreadful dangers hanging over our life, and then we shall have no difficulty in understanding why so many warnings are given us against worldly cares, and what our Lord means by ‘surfeiting and drunkenness.’
From Fr Henry James Coleridge, Passiontide—Part I
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