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In today’s Gospel passage which we just heard, Jesus speaks of the second coming and of the end of the world, and says that it’s very near. “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place” (Mt 24:34). Here we see a few problems. St. Ephraim the Syrian affirms that Christ deliberately gave us vague signs, like earthquakes and wars, so that all men could think that the end of the world is coming in their lives, and in a similar way, St. Thomas Aquinas says that we have seen these signs since the beginning of the world.
What should we say to this? Should we say that Christ has deceived us, if he says that these things are signs of the end of the world, and especially if the aim is to convince people that the end of the world is coming during their lifetime? As the skeptics say in the Second Letter of Peter: “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation!” (2 Pet 3:4).
St. Thomas Aquinas is certainly right in saying that we have always seen signs like earthquakes and wars. We can ask ourselves, though, if this necessarily means that they are not signs of the end. Some of the ancients, like Aristotle, held that the world was eternal, and that it would continue to be always. But, against his position, we can say that earthquakes, comets, and other similar things, are, in fact, signs that the world is not stable, but is something changeable, just like other sensible things. And if the world is changeable, then it will necessarily end sooner or later, just as all the other things which we see in this life. Just as the grass and the flowers are changing and will pass away, so too the earth and the sea, the mountains and the valleys, and even the human race; all of these things are changing and one day will pass away. And thus, it is true that the changes of the earth and the heavens, wars, earthquakes, comets, and other similar things, are signs of the end of the world, even if these signs are always with us.
But we also have a second difficulty: why does Christ suggest that the end will come in our time, and why does he want us to believe him? He explicitly said: “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place” (Mt 24:34), but many generations, and almost 2000 years have passed from when he said this, without the world coming to an end. For all we know, the world could last another 2000 or 20,000 years, or even more! So, why should we believe that the world will end during our lifetime?
To respond to this difficulty, we can ask another question: why is it important to know if the world will end or not? A reason that this is important is that if the world never ends, and therefore it cannot have an aim outside of itself, at least not that kind of aim which in a first moment is not reached, and is then reached at a certain determinate moment. On the other hand, if the world will end, then it can have this type of aim. And, in fact, it seems that it is precisely this reason that we are warned of the coming of the end of the world: because the world will be judged and we will reach the end, that is eternal union with God, the infinite good, or we will not reach this end, according to how we lived our life in this world: well or poorly.
Therefore, we can conclude that, regarding us, the world will end with the end of our life, since after our death, we will not be able to do anything else to reach our objective, even if the rest of the world continues without us. So, in this sense, the world will truly end in our generation, just as it will end for every generation. Each one of us will die someday, and this will be for each one of us the end of the world. Hence, there is the necessity to be ready at every moment, since nobody knows the moment of his own death. As our Lord says:
“Watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Mt 24:42-44).