Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 16, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Now and not yet
Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
 when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
 and the day that is coming will set them on fire,
 leaving them neither root nor branch,
 says the LORD of hosts.
 But for you who fear my name, there will arise
 the sun of justice with its healing rays.
Malachi wrote this (or perhaps Malachi was actually Ezra) four hundred years before Jesus was born. Anyone who reads the Bible with an eye toward time gets confused with phrases like “the day is coming.” Jesus, distinguished as he was at listening to his Abba and living in the moment, spoke of the future often in this way. In Luke 21:
The days will come when there will not be left
a stone upon another stone …
many will come in my name, saying,
‘I am he,’ and ‘The time has come.’
Do not follow them! …
There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars,
At that time they will see the Son of Man
Coming a cloud with power and glory.
When these things begin to take place,
Stand up and lift your heads
Because your redemption is drawing near.
Jesus then speaks with certainty about something that did not happen.
Truly, I tell you, this generation will certainly
Not pass away until all these things have happened.
Heaven and earth will pass away,
But my words will never pass away.
We are more likely to focus on that second statement, since the first prediction is at least confusing, and seems just plain old wrong.
In The Chosen the disciples often appear confused. Rather than confusion, Jesus shows his sadness and loneliness. Ron Rolheiser calls Jesus’ experience “moral loneliness.”
Looking at the Gospel narratives that describe Jesus’ passion and death, we see that what they emphasize in not Jesus’ physical suffering. While those sufferings must have been horrific, the gospels never dwell on them. What they highlight is Jesus’ emotional suffering, his aloneness, his loneliness of soul as he endured his suffering and death. They point out how, in his neediest hour, while alone, abandoned, betrayed, misunderstood, humiliated, and in effect unanimity-minus-one, he was suffering more in soul than in body.
Luke’s Gospel tells us that his agony took place in a garden. This too is revealing. Jesus had agonies elsewhere, in the temple, in the desert, and in his hometown, but his most searing one took place in a garden. Why a garden? As we know, in archetypal literature, gardens are not for growing vegetables, but for delight. The archetypal garden is the mythical place of delight, where lovers meet, where friends drink wine together, and where Adam and Eve were naked, innocent, and didn’t know it. The Jesus who sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane is not Jesus the Teacher, Jesus the Magus, Jesus the Healer, or Jesus the Miracle-worker. In the garden, he is Jesus the Lover, the one who delights in love and who suffers in love – and it’s to this garden of suffering, intimacy, and delight to which he calls us.
The gospels emphasize that what Jesus suffered most deeply in his crucifixion was not the pain of being scourged and having nails driven through his hands, but a deep loneliness of soul that dwarfs even the most intense physical pain. Jesus wasn’t a physical athlete, but a moral one, doing battle in the arena with soul.
Theologians debate the meaning of Luke 21:32. Generation, what’s that? Pass away, what does he mean? Was Jesus confused or wrong, or are we? What no one should debate, however, is the suffering Jesus lived in every day, and that we can recognize and embrace as we die with Christ.
Inside each of us there’s a deep place, a virginal center, where all that’s tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is held and guarded. It’s there that we are most genuinely ourselves, most genuinely sincere, most genuinely innocent. It’s where we unconsciously remember that once, long before consciousness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than our own. It’s where we still sense the primordial kiss of God.
In this place, more than any other, we fear harshness, disrespect, being shamed, ridiculed, violated, lied to. In this place we are deeply vulnerable and so we are scrupulously careful as to whom we admit into this space, even as our deepest longing is precisely for someone to share that place with us. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually, we yearn for someone to sleep with there, morally, a soulmate. Our deepest yearning is for moral consummation.
Rolheiser’s words evoke tears of longing and deep sadness. My heart feels heavy in my chest. Imagine the chest of Jesus, heaving with heartbreak as he watches and feels and knows our absent-minded acceptance of evil all around us, crying out with a voice unheard.
This dying with Christ, however, waits for resurrection. The time is coming, and indeeed is already here.
(Malachi 3, Psalm 98, 2 Thessalonians 3, Luke 21)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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