But in those days, after that suffering,
the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. (Mark 13:24-25)

In 1999, in the month of July, Pope John Paul II shocked the Christian world when he made these statements in his Wednesday audience:

Heaven, or the happiness in which we will find ourselves, is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a personal relation [with God]. ... This final condition can be anticipated in a certain sense now on earth.... Moreover, the pictures of Hell given to us in Sacred Scripture must be correctly interpreted. They express the total frustration and emptiness of a life without God. More than a place, Hell is the state of the one who freely and finally removes himself from God, the source of life and joy.

Why did the Pope deem it necessary to offer this kind of clarification at this time? I think that the Pope was responding to two popular but erroneous ways of looking at biblical texts that have to do with the End Times, namely, rationalism and literalism. We shall illustrate by looking at today’s gospel reading on the End Times from the rationalistic and literalistic points of view, and then we shall point out what the passage can say to us when we read it as the Good News that it is intended to be.

A rationalistic approach will read this passage as the mistaken belief of early Christians that the End Times were just around the corner. But it was a mistake, pure and simple, and that is all we can learn from it. Their associated beliefs that heaven was a physical place in the clouds, and that from there Christ would come back, that stars would fall from the sky, even though we now know that one star is indeed bigger that planet earth, and the belief that earth was a four-cornered flat surface, have all been proven to be wrong by advances in modern science. Conclusion: this is an outdated text that has no value to us, and heaven is nothing but a figment of their primitive imaginations.

A literalistic reading, on the other hand, would treat our passage as a factual prediction of future events that will mark the End Times. If the Bible says heaven is somewhere in the clouds, then heaven is somewhere in the clouds. Maybe the clouds in question are so high above that our astronauts who have been to the moon have not seen it and cannot see it even with their powerful telescopes. As regards Jesus’ saying to his hearers: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (Mark 13:30), literalists quickly abandon literalism and argue that the evangelist who wrote these things certainly misunderstood what Jesus said, since Jesus could not be wrong. Some of them go on and make concrete plans about meeting Jesus in the clouds, like the unfortunate members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who had carefully packed their cabin luggage for their heavenward flight in a comet. Or like the Korean woman who aborted her unborn baby because, how could she rapture and fly in mid-air with all the extra weight of the pregnancy?

Rejecting both rationalism and literalism, the Pope pointed out to us a third way, namely, to recognise these texts as graphic depictions of a gospel message that is always relevant to people of every age and culture. Read in this way, we can pick out these important messages that the text has for us and for people of every generation. Firstly, this world is passing away. Life in this world is like an overvalued high-tech stock that is bound to crash sooner or later. So why should anyone have all their assets in this one stock? It is, therefore, an invitation for us to invest wisely, to invest in things out of this world, to invest in the stock of the kingdom of God.

Secondly, God, the Righteous One will come some day, i.e. the Last Day, to right all the wrongs of this world. Because the world as we know it is a world where often enough innocent people suffer and evil people prosper. Good people may indeed sleep better at night, but bad people seem to enjoy the waking hours more. If that is all there is to life, then why would anybody want to be good and upright rather than bad and smart? The Good News of the End Times assures us that in the final analysis, evil will catch up with the evildoer, and justice will again be just. This will be in the kingdom of God for which this life is only a preparation. As we say the Lord’s Prayer today, let us mean it when we say “Thy kingdom come.”