“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.”

“Then he said to them,

‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. 

There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues

from place to place;

and awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky.

Before all this happens, however,

they will seize and persecute you,

they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons,

and they will have you led before kings and governors

because of my name…

You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends,

and they will put some of you to death.’”

As we get closer to the end of the liturgical year, with the feast of Christ the King of the Universe as the culmination prior to the new liturgical year beginning with the First Sunday of Advent, our readings take on a more stark and apocalyptic tone. In a sense, the end is coming. Advent ushers in a new beginning, the hope of the incarnation and a new horizon of possibility with the incarnation of God in the flesh. Leading up to the fulfillment of the promised messiah, however, we get closer and closer to the ultimate end. In our bones, we sense that things cannot go on as they are. While Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” we can sense, though inspiring, that it may not be true. Man’s inhumanity to man, though a cliché, rings more true today than yesterday. At times, our world seems on the brink of a complete moral breakdown. The threat of weapons of mass destruction, rising conflicts, extreme poverty, human trafficking, income, wealth, and racial disparity, violent crimes, climate related catastrophes, and so much more, point not to greater progress in justice, but the opposite. We are not living in right relationship to others, all of creation, or God. Even if our daily lives for the moment are only tangentially affected, we can sense something is amiss. The world and humanity are not all right. 

The message of the gospel, especially in the Gospel of Luke, which we have been hearing this year and with its emphasis on the reversal of fortunes, speaks to the injustice in our world. God is the God of justice. Things will be made right. It’s not just that God will act in the future, but that God has already acted in human history. Through a people he called his own, God prepared the world for a vision of justice and peace. The birth of Jesus and his own suffering, death, and resurrection inaugurated the last age, the final transformation of human hearts and all the universe. It is already and not yet. There is more to come, but each day we participate in the work God is doing to make things right. Our choices, decisions, relationships, service, and witness matter. They matter now and have eternal significance. Yes, the end is coming, but the end has already begun in you and me. The sun of justice dawns each day through us. The arc of the moral universe only bends toward justice if we bend toward justice. May we bend our knees, bend our hearts, bend our wills, and bend our lives to the God who was, who is, and who is to come.