Trust in God allows us to care and not to care

B33 | 17 NOVEMBER 2024 | MARK 13:24-32

As the Church’s liturgical year draws to a close, the readings at Mass today speak of “the time of distress”. This apocalyptic theme, intimating the end of history and final judgment, is intended, however, not to fuel fear and foreboding, but to dispel it. Christian apocalyptic literature, sometimes spoken of as “the literature of the dispossessed”, was intended originally to encourage the faithful in times of difficulty, especially in persecution: this particular passage was written when the fledgling Church was experiencing for the first time hostility and misunderstanding that would eventually turn into outright hatred. Both pagans and Jews despised early Christians as irreligious disturbers of settled and sacred ways, atheists, even. The Roman historian, Tacitus (b 56AD), records that they were accused of inciting hatred of all things ancient and pious, and even of the human race itself. Their gatherings were rumoured to involve sinister rites, including cannibalism.

But no sooner had persecution ended with the Constantinian peace, than the Christianised Western Empire began to crumble and the Church was again under threat, facing once more an unknown and perilous future. It is almost impossible for us now to appreciate the shock that would have been felt on hearing in 410 that sacred and eternal Rome had been sacked by Alaric the Goth and his barbarian hordes. The world seemed to be collapsing and the end-times seemed imminent. St Jerome (d 420AD), in his cell in Jerusalem, had spoken for many when he said that the whole world was perishing: Totus mundus periit. When in 430AD St Augustine lay on his death bed in Hippo, barbarians were at the gates of the city. The magnitude of such events has been compared to our hearing that a nuclear missile had been launched.

But, as said already, the purpose of these apocalyptic texts is not to rattle but reassure us. The end-times are where we live every day of our lives. For each of us, today and every day is potentially our last. Each of us faces the end of the known world – the world known to us, that is – in the span of our own life. The world, with its all opportunities and promise, passes away for each of us each night, with the closing of a day that will never return. The gift of another day is in God’s hands alone.

Early Christian thinkers asked how the vicissitudes of history and our individual lives can be reconciled with God’s promises. Their answer was the doctrine of providence, which governs everything that happens in this and all possible worlds. Only by entrusting ourselves to God’s providence can we keep a sense of the largest possible picture, while engaging fully with each moment. Only by entrusting ourselves to God’s all-encompassing providence can we do that which we have to do next with delight, as in Meister Eckhart’s description of holiness. Only by trusting in God’s providential presence in every circumstance and every detail of our lives can we steer clear of despairing fatalism on the one hand and anxious activism on the other. Only our sense of God’s providence dispels the equally deadening if polar opposite illusions of thinking either that everything depends on us or that our efforts don’t matter. Only unwavering trust that God is never doing nothing enables us to strike the right balance between detachment and concern, between caring and not caring, so that we can have confidence to make bold decisions and wisdom to sit lightly to all our plans.

Perhaps most important of all, only our unshakable trust in God’s providence can reassure us that not even our worst mistakes and most shameful failings can prevent God from bringing his good purposes, for us personally and for the whole of his creation, to their fulfilment in Him.

This gospel, then, is a message of hope, reassuring us that everything necessary for our salvation is given to us in each moment of our lives, enabling us to live fully in the present, wherever we are and whatever our situation. It was just such assurance that enabled Julian of Norwich (1343-1416) to utter her oft-repeated words: “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”