By Fr Edmund Power, OSB

“Grant us … the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good.”  These are the words of the opening prayer of this penultimate Sunday of the liturgical year, and we would do well to dwell on them and make them our own as we approach the stern apocalyptic message of the readings. Jesus has finally arrived in Jerusalem where He will enter into His paschal destiny. Luke’s Gospel presents His public ministry as an inexorable journey to that fated city where all will be achieved.

But the Lord is impatient of comfortable small-talk and the refusal to face reality head on. What He tells us is stark, essential, even menacing. He bids us to look below the surface of everything and to prepare for what is really taking place. He is not talking about the end of the world in a literal sense, but rather about how signs of culmination break challengingly into present time.

The surface beauty and apparent stability of the temple is just a flimsy mask that will be torn away. A superficial trust in the certainties of formal religious structures will not be enough in the face of what is to come. Then there will be the temptation to follow those who stir up the masses with their self-confidence promises and their powerful words, their striking sound-bites and slogans.

We, however, must remain steady and unswayed, looking always to what is true, discerning the emptiness of so much airy rhetoric. Jesus’s words confirm what we already know: the world in which we live is full of crises and wars and conflicts. He does not hide the difficulties we face; He predicts that those who believe in Him will be ridiculed, as we see so often in the West, and persecuted; even the people from whom we might expect support, or at least understanding, will dismiss us.

How might this bleak description be “good news” for us? It certainly does not offer false hope through pretending that everything is fine. It invites us to face reality, and insists on the final impermanence and unreliability of everything: structures, physical and metaphorical; organizations; politics; even human relationships.

But there is a resolution to be found in the words of the collect: the condition we long for (“gladness” and “happiness”) is available and permanent (“full”, “lasting”, “constant”, “constancy”) only in our loving relationship to God (“being devoted to you”). That relationship enables us to face the challenges with hope and commitment.