As we come now to the end of the Church Liturgical year (next Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year) we are invited to look at the end of the world—the last days. And perhaps it is appropriate that the Gospel is rather apocalyptic.

Today’s readings are a tour through apocalyptic literature. Both Daniel and Mark describe the end times, the final reckoning time when the Lord God and His Son Jesus will triumph over sin and death. The apocalyptic writings are charged with poetry, metaphor, fantasy. We must not make the mistake some of the fundamentalists do and interpret these passages literally. However, we must not make the opposite mistake of dismissing them as “nothing but” poetry. Metaphor tells us truth more fully and more adequately than does plain prose. The truth is Heaven and Earth may indeed pass away, but not before the Final Resolution in which good triumphs over evil. We don’t know when or how that will happen. Those issues really don’t matter. What really matters is the question whether we are faithful and true followers of Jesus.

Jesus delivered his speech shortly before His death. He has a vision of the future event that will happen – the fall of Jerusalem. Mark wrote this Gospel to prepare the people of Jerusalem for the inevitable, and to offer Christians hope in persecution. There will be cataclysmic end to Jerusalem and the Temple. It will appear that evil has won, but there will be remnant. Jesus, through Mark, is telling His listeners and us that there will be terrible tribulation and all will seem lost but we will still triumph in the end. Jesus proved this with his own death.

But the Last Judgment is not something we should fear. In a real sense it is something we should rejoice for it marks the culmination and finalization of God’s plan for the world. Yes, there will be some who, in Daniel’s words, will go to shame and everlasting disgrace. But these are only the ones who totally reject God’s forgiveness and love—they are those who deliberately choose not to seek his mercy.

Jesus warns us there will come a final day, a final moment. Early Christian writers compared our present life to the moist clay on a potter’s wheel. While still wet and pliable, the potter can form the clay into almost any shape. But when he places the clay in the fire, it retains that shape forever. The fire is death. At the moment of death we will either humbly face God or self-righteously turn away from him. For on death we experience a profound moment of truth, the moment of reckoning. Thankfully, however, God’s mercy does not stop when we die; he is, after all, the most merciful Judge.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that there will be an end, not just for the whole world but for our own life. For some it might be a frightening thought because they have not prepared for it. For others, it will be a welcomed event for they will have been preparing to greet their Savior.

Death itself, apparently Satan's triumph over us but he cannot defeat the supreme power of God's love. Saint Paul reminds us: "Christ must reign until God has put all enemies under his feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor. 15:26).

As Christians we are called not to look backward but to look forward with hope. We should join the joyful experiences of the remnants after the fall of Jerusalem who believed that in the end… God always wins.