33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, C November 16, 2025
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“Blazing like an oven.” How does that make you feel? To hear that the “day of the Lord,” the day of Jesus’ return, the end of the world is coming “blazing like an oven?” Well, to a piece of wood or straw, to something or someone who would be destroyed by fire, that must be terrifying. But what if you’re the unfinished pie, full of the right ingredients but needing heat to bring together the delicious perfection you’re meant to be? What if you’re raw ore ready to become pure gold?
There’s a reason scripture uses this double-sided image for the end of the world. Our eternal destiny is not arbitrary. The last judgment is not the expression of some capricious and angry God who damns or save us based on his mood. God does not change. He is light and truth and love and goodness. Whether or not our encounter with him is pleasant or miserable says more about us than it does about him. Just as the same hot oven is good for the pie or the metal ore and bad for the straw, the stubble, and the dross so the same God is experienced as eternal delight by the saints and eternal torment by the wicked.
People ask, “how can a loving God send someone to Hell for all eternity?” as if it were some arbitrary and cruel decision. A better question is, “how could a loving God force someone to be near him against their will?” If a woman refuses to marry you, is it love to force her to live in your house anyway? Or is the loving thing to let her go her own way? God seeks to marry each soul, to be united to us. Like any proposal for marriage, saying yes will mean some difficult changes. We must freely accept it and God respects our decision to reject his proposal. Besides, for someone who rejects God, being in heaven is worse than being in hell. Hell is misery and suffering often described as unquenchable fire. For a soul that rejects God, however, being in heaven would be like moving from being on fire to being in the sun itself.
Normally, it is not possible for flammable wood to transform itself into fire-proof gold. Naturally speaking, it’s not possible for fallen and sinful human beings to transform themselves into glorious children of God. But we are no longer limited by nature because the creator of all things has given us the supernatural gift of grace. Grace received in faith and expressed in love can transform us. This one life on earth is our only window of opportunity for that transformation to take place. Here, Jesus is reminding us how to be transformed.
“By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” For most of us, the transformation from flammable sinfulness to fireproof sanctity is slow. For all of us, it is painful. For this reason, we must be prepared to persevere, to endure, to press on. When Jesus tells the Jews that the Temple – the temple that is God’s own house! – will one day be destroyed completely, he’s reminding them that nothing in this world is safe. We cannot count on a beautiful church to save us and we cannot count on wealth to save us. Nothing in this world can save us. Even the good things in this world must not compete with our love of God.
If we love God, if we really strive to live by the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, we will be persecuted. If we actually practice a life of prayer and penance and charity and loyalty to the truth above all else, then even our relatives and friends, even other Catholics may persecute us. Jesus says this not to scare us, but to prepare us. For us who have lived our Catholic lives in relative peace, who have been able to enjoy all kinds of success and acceptance even as we live our faith, this next point might be hard to believe, but it’s true. Suffering and persecution is part of how we are saved. Persecution and suffering are not unfortunate obstacles on the road to heaven, they are an essential part of that road. In other words, if we do not suffer and we are never persecuted, then we will not be ready for God’s divine fire.
Again and again scripture makes this point. “The Lord chastises those who are close to him in order to admonish them” (Judith 8:27). “Whom the Lord loves, he disciplines.” (Heb 12:6). “Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance” (Jas 1:2-3). “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:10).
While we may not see this particular Church literally torn down by persecution or disaster, we should take Jesus’ warning to heart. Have we fallen into an unconscious presumption that our Catholic lives will always be peaceful and accepted? Do we automatically see trials as failures? Does suffering cause us to deny God’s goodness? Whatever “temple” of worldly safety we have built up, we should be prepared for the eventuality of it being torn down in some way.
And when that tearing down happens in big ways or small ones, we should see them not as signs of abandonment, but as transformation. Jesus tells us, “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues from place to place.” Have these things ever not taken place? Each war, earthquake, famine, and plague is a sign, a reminder that this world will end… your world will end one day. When that happens, when your end comes, what matters most is not how much fun you had, how much money you made, how big your family was, how many friends you had, or what difference you made in history books. What will matter most is whether or not you allowed God to use that time to transform you from flammable stubble into fire-proof gold.
Be not afraid! It’s not that the goal is misery. The goal is eternal joy and glory. God is good and the world he created is good… though broken. There have been, still are, and still will be many good and joyful and pleasant things in the life God has given you. God doesn’t want you to be miserable. He does in fact want you to be happy.
But, by grace, that happiness can coexist with and even come from suffering. Do not confuse the temporary happiness of this life with the eternal joy of the next. Do not confuse the temporary beautiful temples of this world with the eternally indestructible temple of heaven. The end of the world cannot just be a distant idea. That final transformation cannot be something we just keep putting off. To be ready for it, the end of the world has to be a reality present to us right now. Earthquakes and hurricanes and wars and disease and hunger are ways that reality is made present to us. And the end of the world isn’t just a time thing, it doesn’t just come to us in the future, it breaks in from the top down in the present moment, overlapping time and eternity. Persecution is an especially good sign of becoming more heavenly while still on earth.
Your trials are not necessarily punishments. When things go wrong in your life, especially things that you didn’t cause to go wrong, it does not mean God is farther away from you. It simply means that you’re not meant to stay unfinished forever… you’re not meant to remain flammable. A pie cannot bake itself and gold cannot shape itself. There are faults in you that can be removed in no other way than through suffering, death, and the end of the world. There are virtues in you that can be perfected in no other way than through suffering, death, and the end of the world. When one or the other comes for you, do not be afraid and do not doubt your father’s love. Persevere and you will be saved.