"Behold! The days come...," shouts the prophet Jeremiah, and the days do come. The Messiah appears, teaches, works wonders, is crucified, dies, rises again from the dead and ascends to Heaven in glory. And we have missed it. The days have come and gone. And we look upon the words of Jeremiah only with hindsight.
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The passage of time does happen. It isn't an illusion: we do truly grow up and grow old. We experience that and, further, this is an experience common to everyone. There is, however, an illusion we suffer from: this is the illusion that once something has passed it no longer has any part of our lives. Our great-great-great-great grandparents may be dead but our existence now depends on the fact that they will always exist in the records of Time. Indeed, if there were no first parent there would be no us!
The illusion that we have is that the past is not as important as the future. We can see that in today's throwaway culture. As soon as our phone outlives its use, it gets thrown away and is forgotten about. We forget our old school teachers because we grow up, and we forget what we are taught because we don't need that knowledge.
But this cannot be true for the Christian. To the world, Jesus is in the past and gone. To us, He is present here and now and we shall see Him with our eyes and touch Him with our tongues in the Blessed Sacrament. For us, the Past is as present as the Now is. The Christian needs to learn how to experience the past in the present. The Christian needs to learn how to help the children experience the past in the present. The Christian needs to be a child of Eternity.
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Being a Child of Eternity means that we regard the testimony of the First Christians to be of as much important as the Christians of today. In fact, the First Christians are truly fortunate because the ministry of Our Lord is in their living memory, unlike ours. And yet, we are surrounded by the great cloud of saints who are still with us. They may appeared to have died but their death is only a death to this fleeting world. Their lives are in Christ and Christ lives now.
Being a Child of Eternity means we are to live the Christian life in which we grow in God. We may fail but we recognise our failures and make amends before Almighty God. Our time is spent growing, healing and becoming in Christ.
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Today is the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year. Today we look back on the person we once were and see how far we have come. Next Sunday, we begin to look forward again to the coming of Christ once more. We begin the New Year with a new start but from the old place of where we are now. In Christ, all things are new because all things are now: this is what Eternity is. We may be bound to Time with its past, present and future, but the salvation that Christ promises us fills our past, present and future, shoring us up for Eternity.
To this world, we come and we go. To Heaven, we just are. We cannot live our lives rejecting our forefathers because we stand with them in Eternity. They are our neighbours in Eternity and we must love them and learn from them. We must be faithful to the Church Eternal.
Any church which believes that it has to alter the truth in order to minister to Christians of any age is in danger of losing its neighbours in Eternity. A church which seeks relevance in the present age will be stuck to this present age: it will lose both the past and the future by being unfaithful to the Church Eternal.
[PAUSE]
We do not seek to be relevant in any day and age but rather to be consistent with every day and age. At the end of this Liturgical Year, we prepare ourselves to bring the same Catholic Faith into the New Liturgical Year. The prayers will be the same; the rites will be the same; the sacraments will be the same; but we will be different through growth in Christ. Then, one day, freed from past, present and future, we will become Children of Eternity and participate in an Eternal Liturgy before the throne of God Himself.
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