Armaged-Again

The End is Nigh! Again.

Another war. Lord, have mercy. I don’t know that I have enough information to weigh in on the newly minted war against Iran. I consider the news as trustworthy as it was during the first and second Gulf Wars, which is to say that believing the “public narrative” is worse than ignorance. But one headline jumped out at me that I do want to address. Armageddon.

It has been reported that complaints have been filed against a number of military officers for referring to the attack against Iran as the beginning of Armageddon and an important milestone in the timeline leading to Christ’s return in glory. If this is true, it will be used to cast “Christian Nationalism” in the role of the ignorant belligerent. “It’s Christians that are behind this war,” I already hear from people in the news.

There is a strain of Evangelical and Non-denominational theology that has been aggressively promoting the idea that “THIS IS THE END TIMES” across America for generations. I don’t want to throw stones, because one of these churches played a pivotal role in my return to the faith on my journey home to the Catholic Church.

Christ’s return in glory is a central part of our Catholic faith, there’s no denying it. It’s important enough that it made it into both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds. Our Catholic faith directs our hope towards the eschaton: the final and complete triumph by God over death and evil. We believe that it will be fully accomplished at some particular time and will start at some particular place. We believe that the end times are a thing.

When is when?

But the question of when and where has bedeviled us for millennia. St. Paul talks about it in 1 Thessalonians 4:14-15: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep. Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.”

St. Paul writes to a church that fully expects the Parousia, Christ’s triumphant return in glory, to come at any moment. It sounds to me as though he personally expected Christ to come before his own martyrdom at the hands of the Romans.

In the centuries that followed him, apocalyptic imagery in the Gospels, the Book of Revelation, and other books of the Bible, inspired countless pronouncements that “The end is NIGH!!” I’m sympathetic to people who believed that in the face of such threats as the Roman persecution of Christians, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, Attila the Hun, and the Mongol Hordes.

The Protestant Reformation spawned a host of new “prophecies” that the second coming was just around the corner. America itself has produced more than a few end-time prophets in the past two centuries. The one thing that all of these pronouncements had in common, including any that might emanate from the current presidential administration, is that they were wrong. The world has not ended.

The mystery of the coming of the fullness of the kingdom is addressed directly by Jesus. After telling His disciples of all the signs that will signify the beginning of the end, He tells them, “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” (Matthew 24:36) Even St. Thomas Aquinas wrestled with this passage, because it implies that Jesus does not possess the full omniscience of God the Father, which would make Him less than the Father. It also seems to contradict Jesus telling His disciples, “The Father and I are one.” (John 10:30)

St. Thomas resolves this by replying that Christ was essentially saying, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He clarifies that Jesus was speaking out of His humanity, which was capable of growing in wisdom and knowledge, and not out of His Divinity, which possesses the fullness of knowledge from the Beginning.

More importantly, the reason for this mystery can be found in the next words of the passage, “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of the night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” (Matthew 24:42-44)

God doesn’t tell us when He’s going to come in glory because He doesn’t want us to put off repentance. If I knew that I was going to die on my 75th birthday, I’d be sorely tempted to wait until the 360th day of my 74th year of life to get down to the business of repenting. Instead, Jesus wants us to live as if our judgment could happen at any moment.

Prepare for your own judgment.

In the Catholic mind through the ages, the idea of the final judgment has rightly taken a back seat to the idea of the particular judgment. Each one of us will face Christ, one on one, and make an account for our actions. We will be judged on whether we lived our faith, turned from sin, and cared for the poor. God does not guarantee another day of life to any person or even any civilization. As the Psalms echo, man is like the grass of the field that springs up one day and withers the next.

So when the question is whether or not to drop a bomb on enemy territory, the idea of starting Armageddon should be the last thing on a commander’s mind. Far better to consider the souls of the soldiers and civilians that will be sent to their particular judgments. They’ll have to answer for that decision when they face their own judgment. Which will come like a thief in the night.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Article first published at CatholicStand.com