New Heavens and New Earth 15th Sunday Year A
Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 65; Romans 8:8-23; Matthew 13:1-23
The second reading for today from Paul’s letter to the Romans is about a new age with a new heavens and new earth that awaits us after Jesus comes for the second time to judge the living and the dead.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the new age with a new heavens and new earth that awaits us when Jesus comes to judge the living and the dead is one of seven truths concerning eternal life. The seven truths are: death and eternal life, particular judgment, heaven, purgatory, hell, public final judgment, and a new heavens and new earth. (CCC 1021-1050)
In describing the new age to be fully instituted by Christ on earth, the Catechism states:
This reign is still under attack by the evil powers, even though they have been defeated definitively by Christ’s Passover. Until everything is subject to him, “until there be realized new heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells, the pilgrim Church, in her sacraments and institutions, which belong to this present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass, and she herself takes her place among the creatures which groan and travail yet and await the revelation of the sons of God.” That is why Christians pray, above all in the Eucharist, to hasten Christ’s return by saying to him: Marana tha! “Our Lord, come!” (CCC, 671)
The new heaven and new earth which we participate in sacramentally now and will be fully realized after Christ’s Second Coming.
Scott Hahn speculates that the rise of the New Age movement and its “counterfeit version” of the new age is partly due, or largely due, to a tendency among Catholics to ignore Church teachings on the end of times, how creation relates to the sacraments, and more specifically how the Eucharist relates to the entire created world. [1]
Every time we celebrate the Holy Mass, we are participating in the eternal liturgy of heaven, which is outside of time, as John describes in Revelation, the last book of the Bible. The heavenly liturgy is celebrating Jesus’ fully realized defeat of evil in the world, both human evil of sin and natural evil such as cancer and earthquakes.
Through the seven Sacraments, we participate here, but in a not-yet-perfected state, in the new age of eternal peace, truth, and love brought by Jesus in his incarnation. Our experience of this new age of Jesus is not yet perfected since we are caught in time, waiting for the end of time as we know it now, when Jesus comes in his full glory to judge the living and the dead.
Marana tha! Come Lord Jesus! – May God Bless You All – Father Peter
[1] Scott Hahn, The End: The Book of Revelation (Saint Joseph Communications), 12 CD set.
Catholic Evangelization 