Sermons from the Latins/Sermon 58
Twenty-fourth Sunday After Pentecost.
Judgment.
"There shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world, neither shall be." — Matt. xxiv. 21.
SYNOPSIS.
Ex.: I. Protestants as to fear of God. II. Worthy motive. III. Church's liturgy.
I. Last day: i. Sudden, certain, uncertain. 2. Great day. 3. Day of the Lord.
II. Commotion: 1. In earth and heaven. 2. In souls of men. 3. The resurrection.
III. Judgment: 1. Trembling criminal. 2. Rendering of verdict. 3. Sentence and execution.
Per. : 1. Faithful servant. 2. Parable of fig-tree. 3. Holy indifference and fear.
SERMON.
Brethren, Catholic pulpits excepted, the preaching of the fear of the Lord has become a thing of the past. It is a harsh subject, equally offensive to the refined and the sinful, and besides, say the reformers and the reformed, it makes of sinners hypocrites still more displeasing to God. Yet Holy Writ has it that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, that it drives sin from the soul, and that without it no one can be sanctified. St. Augustine compares fear of God and the grace of God to a needle and thread, it being utterly impossible for God's grace to enter the soul unless the fear of the Lord precede. No vice was more roundly rated by Christ than hypocrisy; yet He frequently pointed to death and judgment and hell as objects of dread, and He bade us fear, not so much him who kills the body, but rather him who after he hath killed the body can destroy both soul and body unto hell. The greatest saints, SS. Ambrose, Basil, Jerome, etc., felt, confessed, and taught the fear of the Lord, and St. Augustine, while assigning it as the cause of his own conversion, declares it to be the climax of every call to repentance. This, no doubt, is why the Church in her liturgy so often addresses herself to our sense of fear, as, for instance, on the first Monday in Lent, and again in the gospels of the cockle and good wheat, and the net cast into the sea, and especially on this, the last, and on next Sunday, the first, of the Ecclesiastical Year, in the awful pictures of the Last Judgment.
Brethren, the reasons are not far to seek why the gospel of the year's last Sunday should be the gospel of the last day, but it is not so clear why on the first Sunday of Advent the Church takes for her theme the terrors of judgment. Her object in placing in such close juxtaposition Christ's first and last coming is to remind us that, while contemplating God's infinite mercy in the person of the humble and pathetically helpless babe, we must not forget His equally infinite justice, to be revealed in the majestic coming of the Judge of the living and the dead. Moreover, the portentous events which shall presage the Lord's second coming were in a mystical sense realized at His birth. The Sun of Justice was darkened when the Word of God clothed Himself in human flesh, and the moon, God's kingdom on earth. His Church, which shines with a borrowed light and has varied from the new to the full with the vicissitudes of time — the moon, alas! was at that moment small indeed, and shed abroad but little of that light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. Or perhaps it was Mary, fair as the moon, Queen of angels and of men, whose glory was on that night dimmed, an unhonored outcast, in the dark recesses of the stable. The stars fell from heaven: one to guide the Magi, and those others, brighter still, the angels, to lead the shepherds Bethlehemwards. The world of sinners, of which the sea is such a perfect figure, was agitated, for Herod was troubled and all Jerusalem with him, and there was distress of nations when the Holy Family fled in terror to Egypt, and the Magi returned in fear by another way, and the royal soldiers slew the Innocents. So striking, then, is the parallel between Christ's first and second coming that the Church considers the dread judgment, time's end, and the beginning of eternity, to be a salutary thought both for the closing and the opening of her year.
Brethren, the details of to-day's Gospel would seem as unreal and incredible as a horrible dream were it not that Christ has sworn that all these things shall come to pass, and that though heaven and earth shall pass away His word shall not go unfulfilled. That the day of doom will come, and come suddenly, is certain, for as lightning cometh out of the east and flasheth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the Son of man be. But beyond this, when it shall come and with what results for us individually, all is uncertain, for these things are known to no man, neither Adventist nor so-called prophet, no, not even to the angels in heaven, but to the Father alone. This certain uncertainty it is which gives a peculiarly dreadful aspect to the other horrors of the last day. In the Acts of the Apostles we are told that when Paul the Apostle preached on judgment before Governor Felix, that Pagan's heart stood still in terror. Yet for a Christian how much more real and full of meaning is that awful subject. Dies tree, dies ilia, or as the Scriptures term it, the great day, the day of the Lord. A great day indeed, which shall sum up in itself the events, the effects, the reckonings of all previous days, and on which the storm-cloud of God's wrath, which through all time has been slowly gathering, shall burst upon the world. In a moment the world's motion, the rush of the heavenly bodies, and the bustle of human activity shall give way to eternal silence, as when the power is shut off in a mighty factory, and presently each of us shall depart for his allotted home forever and ever. Dies magna, yes, and day of the Lord too. All time may be said to consist of two days, man's day and God's. Through life we are free agents, able even to defy and outrage God, and God patiently bears it all, as though He heeded not or slept. But be assured His day is coming when His will alone shall prevail, and when past accounts shall be squared. Thus it happened to the Jews. They had their day when they Stoned the prophets and persecuted and crucified the Saviour, and except that Christ wept over Jerusalem because she had not known, and that in this, her day, what things were for her peace, God made no move, but bore with them. But His day came when the Romans came, and when the whole Jewish nation was given up to fire and sword and famine and pestilence and banishment and slavery; But even the horrors of Jerusalem's siege, though a figure, are but a faint reflection of the woes to come. That and such like calamities which the world has yet known were, says St. Clement, " but the skirmishes which precede the final and decisive conflict between the forces of guilt and retribution." O God! if a brush between the outposts be such, what shall be the horrors of the general engagement? Wisdom (v. 18) describes God as " putting on the armor of His zeal and wielding the sword of His wrath and shooting as missiles shafts of lightning and thick hail from the clouds, and inciting the winds and the seas to rage against and destroy His enemies." " That day," says the Prophet Sophronius, " is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds. I will distress men, and they shall walk like blind men, and their blood shall be poured out as earth and their bodies as dung. Neither shall their silver and gold be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord."
Brethren, though many descriptions of the last day are found in Scripture, the Lord's account is, naturally, unsurpassed. And verily, the subject, the death of a world, was worthy of a God. Man is called a little world, and his death agony, the darkness which enshrouds his reason and senses and the commotion of the humors of his body, are a tiny picture of what shall take place in heaven and earth at the world's dissolution. The equilibrium of the universe demands that earth and heavenly bodies keep each its place and orbit, but when the sun is turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, and the stars have fallen, there will be nothing but ruin and confusion in heaven, on earth, and in the souls of men. Think of a shipwreck horror, the stricken vessel floundering through a raging sea, shaken and strained in every joint, amid darkness impenetrable, relieved, no, intensified, by the lightning's glare, and quivering with the thunder's crash, and on her decks a wailing company, waiting for death to come to them from the fire within her or from the storm without. An awful picture, but still nothing compared to the wreck of a world. I stood on Mount Vesuvius once and felt the earth quake beneath my feet and looked into the roaring, burning crater, but what was that to a shattered world with all its pent-up fires let loose? What a weird horror thrills us during an eclipse! But that is nothing. What a comfort a light and company 2>re during a fierce midnight thunderstorm! Yet that is nothing. The burning of a city is nothing, nor the Johnstown disaster, nor the destruction of Galveston. Men can witness these and similar catastrophes and survive, but not so when the world falls, for, says the Gospel, "men shall then wither away for fear and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world." But not all will suffer equally from fear, for the Gospel adds that when these things begin to come to pass, Christ will say to some: " Look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand." In Paul's description (Thess. iv. 15) of Gabriel's arrival and trumpet call to judgment, there is a tone of hope, of triumph almost, "for," he says, "the dead who are in Christ shall rise first, and then we who are alive shall be taken up with them to meet Christ, and so we shall be always with the Lord." Hope and despair, therefore, will be at the bottom of all the differences between the wicked and the just. For when at the trumpet's call, and under the shadows of darkness, the earth and seas shall have given up their dead, how eagerly will the souls of the blessed rush to embrace and inhabit and glorify those sweet companions of this earthly exile, their bodies, so long separated from them, but now to be reunited with them forever. Together they bore the burden of life's day, and conquered in life's battle, and well may the soul now cry: "Arise, sister, the winter is passed and the rain has gone; arise, my beloved, and come." Each being in perfect accord with the other, both may well exclaim with the Psalmist: " How good and sweet it is for brothers to dwell in unison." But alas! the case will not be such with all. With what reluctance and loathing will the lost soul join issues once again with its putrid body, what mutual recrimination, what agony! God's final act of mercy to the damned will be to shroud those woeful reunions with that hour of densest darkness that will precede the dawn of eternity.
Brethren, then, in a burst of light, shall appear the Son of man with great power and majesty. " They shall go," says Isaias, " into the holes of rocks and into the caves of the earth from the face of the fear of the Lord and from the glory of His majesty," and St. John in the Apocalypse adds that the very " earth and heaven shall flee from His face." And if even the angels and the blessed shall tremble as they do who witness from the shore a storm at sea, what shall be the terror of the wicked! They shall look upon Him whom they crucified, and they shall wail and lament as do they who have lost an only-begotten son. They shall realize that for them the day of mercy has passed and the interminable night of justice begun. They shall feel that though the Old Law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been abolished in this world, it has never been abrogated in the next. But their penitential moans shall be all too late, for He shall separate them as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; the just He shall station on His right hand and the wicked on His left. Brethren, think of all the sad partings of friends and relatives by distance and by death that you have ever experienced or heard of, and let the bitterness of them be a salutary warning against that final separation. " And," says St. John (Apoc. xx. 12), " I saw the dead, great and small, standing in the presence of the throne, and the books were spread, and the dead were judged by those things which were written in the books, according to their works." All our good deeds and bad, weighty and trivial, aye, even every idle word, all our thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions, and the deeds of others in which we were either concerned or implicated — all are there recorded for or against us, and by them shall we be judged. And if the just man trembles for his fate and is barely saved, what shall we say of the sinner? Oh, woe to us if our one-time friend, but secret enemy, the devil, shall be able before the judgment-seat to turn the weight of evidence against us! Woe to us if it shall there appear that we deliberately replaced God's image in our soul with the brand of the beast! Woe to us if while the Saviour's promises failed to elicit our service, we yielded to the devil's empty blandishments! That awful sentence will then be ours: " Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Christ cursed the fig-tree, and it withered to the root — a figure of the blighting effect of that sentence on an immortal soul, for thenceforth the day of growth in virtue and of bearing fruits worthy of penance is closed forever. Nor will it avail us aught to call on the rocks and hills to fall upon and hide us, for the sentence once pronounced will be executed. "And," says St. John (Apoc. xviii. 21), "a mighty angel took up, as it were, a great millstone and cast it into the sea saying: With such violence as this shall Babylon be thrown down," and he continues (Apoc. xiv. 11), " the smoke of their torments shall ascend up forever and ever, neither have they rest day or night."
Brethren, it is appointed unto all men once to die, and after death the judgment, and no man living is sure that his particular and general judgments mays not coincide. That day is coming, is coming now, and will arrive suddenly like a thief in the night. Men will be planning for the future, planning for honors, riches, and pleasures, and lo! the Lord will be even at their doors to demand their souls of them. Let us not be like them, but let us rather imitate that servant who when his lord came was found watching. From the color of the sky, men can foretell the weather of the morrow, and from the budding trees they know that summer is nigh. Let it not be said that the children of this age are wiser in their generation than the children of light, for we too from the lapse of time ought to learn every day that our judgment is drawing nearer and nearer. What we most need are holy indifference and holy fear: indifference to the things of earth and fear for the things beyond. Be not unduly concerned if your earthly state be not all that could be desired. Remember that men in this life are like the grains of winter wheat — the severer the winter the more abundant will be the next season's harvest. But it is criminal not to be solicitous for the world to come. Holy David feared to meet his God, and holy Job trembled for the time when God should rise against him in judgment, and Paul the Apostle, though conscious of no wrong, yet dared not account himself just. And shall we, miserable sinners as we are, approach the dread tribunal without a qualm or tremor? Watch ye, therefore, for you know not the day nor the hour. Live well that you may die well, and dying well receive a favorable judgment. May our passage through life and death be such that those words of the divine Judge may be addressed to us: " Come, ye blessed of My Father, possess ye the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."