“We Will Be There When We Get There”
Pastor’s Pen -November 16, 2025
Next weekend, we celebrate the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, which marks the end of the liturgical year. The scripture readings for the weekend before the end of the liturgical year raise questions concerning the end of the world. Ironically, the week following the celebration of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, or the First Sunday of Advent, also raises questions concerning the end of the world. Why is there such a preoccupation with an unanswerable question: “When is the end of the world?”
The first reading this weekend is taken from the Second Letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Paul’s first letter to the church of Thessalonia is the oldest (or the first) dated scripture in the New Testament. This letter was written in the middle of the 4th decade of the first century and is St. Paul’s first letter after his conversion on the road to Damascus. The second letter was written about a decade later. Like many of the “new” church communities, the converts in Thessalonia believed that Jesus Christ would return in their lifetimes. During these times, the Gospels as we know them were in oral form and had not yet been written down. It was later that the four Gospels were placed at the beginning of the New Testament in the Bible.
St. Paul discovered the converts of Thessalonia were shocked that newly baptized converts were dying, which did not seem to harmonize with Jesus’ well‑known statement to return “in a little while.” Paul’s two letters to the church in Thessalonia were intended to reassure the people that death before the second return of Jesus Christ was a normal event. This was the beginning of teaching a unique Christian revelation — that death is not the end of a life, but a mysterious beginning of resurrected life.
The liturgical year, which begins with the First Sunday of Advent and ends with the Saturday immediately following the celebration of Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, is best depicted on a circular calendar. You might say “the end flows into the beginning” when we speak of liturgical time. At Easter, when the Paschal candle (and its fire) are blessed, we are reminded Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending of time. This is why humans find eternity such a difficult concept to grasp — as there really is no beginning and there really is no end.
When I was a child and we were in the car on what seemed to be a long, maybe even endless trip, we would ask my Dad, “When will we be there?” My Dad had a wisdom that only now I appreciate when his unchanging answer was, “We will be there when we get there.” So it is with the end of time or the end of the world. We will be there when we get there.
Father Gary
