November 16, 2025

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle C

Malachi 3:19-20; 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12; Luke 21:5-19

Ronald Reagan used to tell this story. There was a family with two young sons, one of which was a incurable optimist and the other was a very negative pessimist. A friend suggested a way of helping both children. They took two rooms, and filled one with a huge assortment of the best toys, and other other they filled with horse manure. They took the pessimist to the room of toys and the optimist to the other room, thinking that this would teach each of them a lesson on the limits of his particular way of looking at the world. After an hour, they went into the room with the toys, and the boy was crying. When asked why he was crying, he said that there wasn't the exact toy in the exact color and exact size he wanted. When they went into the other room, they were equally surprised that they found the little boy sitting on the top of the pile gleefully throwing chunks down from the pile. When asked why he was so happy, he said: “There's got to be a pony down here somewhere!”

Just like in chemistry a Litmus test will tell you whether a particular liquid is an acid or a base, today's readings will tell you whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. In addition, it will also bring out whether you live in reality or have a tendency to create your own reality. Especially the Gospel reading, it shows us that Jesus is both an optimist and a realist, and he, like Malachi in the First Reading and Saint Paul in the Second reading, is telling us clearly to do the same.

Let's take them one at a time. A Christian must be realistic. It may be fun to fantasize, and good Christian writers such as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were adept at drawing fantasy worlds in their novels. The problem occurs when our flights of fancy affect our current reality and the need to deal with our life as we find ourselves today. Christ said that the poor were blessed, that theirs was the kingdom of heaven, but then he told his disciples to feed them, to clothe them, to give alms to them. Saint Paul in the Second Reading is dealing with just such a problem of people losing sight of reality. Some people in the church in Thessalonica that he founded have decided the the end of the world, the second coming of Christ, is so near that it is unnecessary to plan for the future, even the near future, and are not even helping those in their church community to provided food and other basic necessities. Paul is quite direct, telling them to get off their, well, you know, and get to work. This may be one of the first recorded incidents of some Christians taking unrealistic conclusions based on their understanding of how God made this world and would bring it to an end but it would not be the last. It may be fun to watch a child play house or cops and robbers, and we may even engage in it ourselves to help amuse our kids or grandkids. It is another thing altogether to believe that what you are doing is real. It would be nice if we lived in a world without evil, but this is not realistic since it would also then be a world without free will. We can dream of a utopia, but we must never fall into the trap that it is possible, at least here on earth. There is an irony today that the Soviet Union quoted today's Second Reading in their constitution, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat” [ https://politicaltheology.com/the-bible-and-the-soviet-constitution-of-1... ]. The irony is that their communistic system, based on unrealistic views of human behavior, took the wrong lesson from the bible that they were quoting from. The ultimate irony is that Communism, which rejected God and was officially atheistic, was the most unrealistic expression of human society yet developed, and every country that has tried it quickly devolved into old-fashioned non-utopian totalitarianism. To the person who is unrealistic, who tells you that the time is come, that they have some special insight into God's plan, Jesus tells you: “do not follow them” [Luke 21:8 NABRE].

The second lesson that Christ teaches us today is the need to be optimistic. Jesus tells us that there will be and always have been many signs, but these signs are to remind us that the end is coming – maybe the end of the world, most probably the end of us, since death will claim us all. A Christian is always an optimist, knowing that evil is in the world but that God promises to overcome it in his own time and in his own way. This is especially important as we are about to start a new Church year. We will, in the next several months, revisit those two signs of Christian hope that God sent into the world. We will shortly celebrate the season of Advent, when we will prepare ourselves in hopeful anticipation for that great source of hope, the birth of our savior at Christmas. And then, next spring, we will again prepare ourselves during Lent in the hopeful anticipation for the fulfillment of that Christmas hope, our promise of salvation which is the glory of Easter.

This year is of course a jubilee year and Pope Francis named it the Jubilee of Hope, a reference to the pilgrimage we are all on in this life to live out the hope of Christ our savior. Especially relevant to what we are discussing is the fact that, this weekend in Rome, there is a special jubilee celebration dedicated to the poor. Christ's first public act in his ministry was to proclaim from the Book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” [Luke 4:18-19] We as a Church celebrate this promise this weekend in a special way, not only in Rome but in our parish intention for the week, as we pray for the poor, that they might not lose hope. Our bishop in his pastoral plan for November has also asked us, in the spirit of evangelization, to develop ways to find Jesus in others and to bring our faith, that is to say, our hope, to others. We must live out our optimism, and maybe more than optimism, the assurance that is the last sentence of our Gospel, the lesson that Christ is trying to teach us today: “By your perseverance you will secure your lives” [Luke 21:19].

As we continue with the celebration of the Eucharist, let us hopefully join in communion with those who share the optimism of the blessings of God, both in this life and the next. May we always live our lives with one foot in the reality of our current situation and with the other foot setting out in the optimism of the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. We can spend our time in the misery of not having enough or of losing what we have, or we can spend our days looking for the pony, looking ahead to the promise of our assured salvation in Christ. Father Lee, when I told him about my homily, told me to tell everyone that their homework this week is this: to go forth and find that pony.