End Times Wisdom: Homily for November 16, 2025
Readings and Virtual Homily for November 16, 2025, Thirty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time; Powering Through This Mid-November Virtual Homily
Readings for Mass this Sunday:
Malachi 3:19-20
Psalm 98:5-6, 7-9
2 Thessalonians 3:7-12
Luke 21:5-19
Dear Friends and Family,
We are at the next-to-last Sunday of the liturgical year; the predominant theme is the end times. Had we not had solemnities the past two weekends, this theme would have predominated among their readings, as well. The last two or three Sundays before the Feast of Christ the King (next week, and the last Sunday of the liturgical year) the readings focus on eschatological themes, that is, they focus on the end of this world and on the afterlife, on the life of the world to come.
Eschatological, even apocalyptic themes are not unusual in the prophets and the psalms. Today's first reading from Malachi might be understood as one of the few Old Testament references to Hell.
"For the day is coming," Malachi writes, "blazing like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, leaving them neither root nor branch" (vs. 19).
This warning could, of course, be taken in a strictly temporal sense, but even then it is pretty fierce. It describes something the world has not yet seen; the day of the Lord, the day of inescapable judgment and justice. The psalm looks forward to this day, prophesying the day when "the Lord...comes to govern the earth, to govern the earth with justice and the peoples with fairness" (vs. 9).
The passage from Luke is early in chapter twenty-one of that Gospel; Luke's "end times" chapter. It gives little of the detail that the rest of the chapter provides, regarding end times prophecy from Jesus. And some of what is included in today's reading refers to the destruction of the Temple, an event some thirty-five years in the future at the time of Jesus. The destruction of the Temple, by the Romans in 70 AD, and the concomitant leveling of Jerusalem, the exile -- on pain of death -- of the Jews from their own capital city, certainly must have felt like an end times event to the first century Jews.
In fact, Jesus tells the disciples that wars and insurrections will occur; that "many will come in my name, saying 'I am he' and 'the time has come'" (vs. 8). Jesus warns the disciples not to follow those who say the end is here; he assures the disciples that "such things must happen first but it will not immediately be the end" (vs. 9).
This is a piece of advice from the Lord that we might bear in mind today, when, in certain sectors of the Church and among the evangelicals, there is what might be termed fervent end times speculation. As I have said before and no doubt will say again, I believe that we have entered that period of history which Scripture refers to as the last days. But it has been the consistent teaching of the Church that the end times might be understood as spanning generations, and even centuries. Significant attention has been paid, for instance, by Catholic scholars, to the French Revolution, to the Enlightenment and the rise of Masonry -- eighteenth century developments -- as indicative of what we might term the beginning of the end.
I am aware of various websites and You Tube channels out there, claiming Catholic credentials, which are making bold predictions about the rise of the Anti-Christ, as just one example, in our times; I mean, like within the coming decade. While the timing of events is known, according to Jesus, to the Father alone (Acts of the Apostles 1:7), I am no stranger to this question. I have written a book on it. The Anti-Christ, I will just go out on a (well-supported, in my view) limb and say it, is not even born yet. No one alive today should expect to see the Second Coming.
I want to close with the observation that a lot of what is out there in Catholic (and Protestant) cyberspace is missing the real point of these prophecies, which is not to engage in parlor games about the possible identities of apocalyptic beasts and "countdowns" to Armageddon, but rather, to turn our hearts and minds to the great reality which lies just over the threshold of eternity, the reality of our own eternal destinies, the reality of sainthood, on which we are rightly focused every November, the month when we remember the novissimi, that is, not the last things so much as the new things.
To quote again from the psalm (though these opening verses are not included in today's reading): "Sing a new song to the Lord, for he has done marvelous deeds...the Lord has made his victory known...All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God" (vss. 1-3).
I am writing this from San Damiano in Danville, where I am on the last of the autumn retreats with the high school, this one a Kairos retreat, the big three-day affair we host several times a year for the juniors. I will be at St. Clare's Retreat Center in Soquel, by the time this arrives in mailboxes, giving a retreat there, to Bay Area chapters of the Legion of Mary. I return from that retreat Sunday afternoon to the monthly Family Mass at O'Dowd followed by our 630 evening Mass at St. Clement. And the next day I head to LA for San Gabriel Media meetings. Never a dull moment, on this sabbatical!
Because it has been a long first day here on Kairos, and it is now going on midnight, I will close this one here.
Take good care and God bless.
Love,
Fr. Brawn