Today’s passage from Daniel contains one of the clearest teachings in the Old Testament on both the resurrection of the dead and the last things. There will be those who rise to everlasting glory and those who rise to everlasting “contempt,” or “disgrace,” as the New American Bible has it. We’re talking about heaven and hell, effectively, though the terms themselves would be anachronistic for Daniel. The saints are those who allow the light of heaven to shine through them. The damned are those who reject that light. Ultimately, here, the “contempt” isn’t some kind of divine rejection, but rather their own rejection of God. That, at least, is central to the Catholic teaching on hell: it isn’t really a punishment per se, but a choice. So the modern unease about hell is ultimately an unease about human freedom.
Perhaps the modern unease is more about the idea that anyone would consciously choose hell. Here, too, Daniel, along with our passage from Mark, reminds us how the myth of inevitable progress is false. We’ve all heard the quote about the “arc of the universe” bending toward justice. What all the apocalyptic literature shows is that the arc of the universe bends toward destruction, corruption, and self-dissolution. It is only in the final day, when that arc of the universe is ended and re-created, that peace, justice, goodness, and truth triumph. The pious platitudes we hear today about being on the “right side of history” suggest a simplistic optimism about history and its end. The only right side of history is the side of the one who made history and who will end it and make it anew.
All this might seem cynical and depressing if it weren’t for the insistent reminder in Hebrews that in a certain way the end of history has already begun with the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, the once for all self-oblation of the God-man, the world’s only true priest. In an important way, history really did end in AD 33. So it should be no surprise that the Christian interpretation of Mark 13, and its parallel passages in Matthew and Luke, is comfortable seeing the apocalypse both as an immediate reality, such as the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, and a final revelation at the end of days. When Jesus insists that “this generation” will see the events foretold, we can accept at the same time that he really does mean this generation in the most obvious literal sense, and this generation in the sense of this larger age of the world.
You see, both the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 and the final end of history at some unknown future date are shadows and reflections of what already happened on the cross, when the old creation, or the old temple, died, and the new creation, or the new temple, was born. In his commentary on our passage in Hebrews, Peter Kreeft suggests that, just as the priests of the Old Covenant were “shadows,” pointing to the priesthood of Christ to come, so Catholic priests today are also after-shadows, pointing back to the priesthood of Christ that has come. That’s not the most precise language, but I see the point: ultimately, all forms of priesthood are judged by their proximity to the priesthood of Christ.
This is again why so many modern attempts to read the apocalyptic language of the Bible—or, for that matter, of the latest Marian apparition or vision—seem to miss the point in their obsession about reading the signs of the times. The fact that we see signs of the hastening of the end does not mean the end is any more imminent than it has been since the beginning of the end or the countless signs of the times observed over the last two thousand years. We are not special, if to be special means to live in special times. But we are all created and willed on purpose, given a brief span in which we can seek God in history. Rather than worrying about the End Times, John Bergsma asks, “Shouldn’t the imminent end of our own lives—which for each of us cannot be much more than seventy years in the future, and for most of us much less—be enough motivation for us to seek reconciliation with God?”
Surely this is what Holy Church wants us to see in these end-of-year reflections on the Last Things before we turn to Advent. There are of course things we can do in this world that we might rightly call “progress.” But we must remember that all these small victories are but part of a greater whole where the most important victory has already been won, and where many other battles are likely to be lost. Our vocation isn’t to fret about the twists and turns of history, but to make the right choices, in what limited time we have, that lead towards the light and beauty of heaven rather than towards the pain and isolation of hell.