Perhaps the most important thing Holy Scripture tells us about the end of the world is that it will come. The Lord explains to the disciples in considerable detail that the end will be like a harvest, when creation brings its fruit to the Creator. But what He adds next is also very important: we do not know the hour at which our Lord will come. Later, after the Resurrection, the Savior will say this even more definitely: it is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority. It follows that we need to know the fact that the end will come, since the Lord Himself bears witness to it, but we are not meant to know the time of its coming. Moreover, in His parables Christ calls us always to be ready for that day.

The ancient Christians expected the end of the world to come from day to day, and this expectation, on the one hand, inspired them and gave them strength to withstand persecutions and temptations, but, on the other hand, after two or three centuries had passed, it became the cause of a certain perplexity, disappointment, and rethinking of the Gospel. In our time we have so forgotten the very essence of the coming end that dates and signs of its arrival trouble us more than what we will say at the Last Judgment.

The point is presumably that the news of the end of time is necessary for us not so that we might determine our actions and deeds in some different way. We must live in God’s truth always: on the day after the creation of the world and on the eve of its end. Rather, the fact that history is to be completed is needed so that we may have the right attitude toward this world and its realities. The heavens will grow old like a worn-out garment, and together with them evil and suffering, violence and lies, which we bring into creation, will disappear. This is at once a day of judgment and a day of hope. We will see Christ and we will see His creation in all the beauty He intended. Compared with this, the whole burden of dependencies and illusions that fills our consciousness and from which we will in any case have to part recedes into the background.

Those who reflect on the times of the Second Coming and the Last Judgment for some reason pay more attention to the cataclysms accompanying those critical times than to Jesus' very clear words that at that expected moment normal everyday life will continue: neither customary labors, nor weddings, nor even the taking of food will stop. The main upheavals will occur not in the earth's crust or in the atmosphere, but in people's lives, in their souls. The choice the Lord offers us is made already now, and it is made quietly and unnoticed by most of those around us. Completely similar people make the choice, but they make it differently. Until a certain time they are side by side, but the hour of parting will come, when each will go along the path he has chosen for himself.

It is interesting that here Jesus again mentions the fig tree, offering it to the disciples as an example of one that can sense the changes of the times. These words once more make us remember another fig tree, the one that gave no fruit. We are called to be constantly ready to bear fruit and place it in the Lord's hands.

The prophetic discourse on the Mount of Olives, which we read today in the Gospel according to Matthew, has aroused enormous interest from the moment it was written. At times this interest took on entirely unhealthy proportions, especially in certain heretical sects. But Christians who were "normal" from the point of view of confession and mental health also did not ignore this text. Perhaps only Revelation can compare with it in this regard... There is something in us that draws our attention to the end of the world... Perhaps the madness of the world in which we live, apart from our will, calls up thoughts of the end in us... Or perhaps this is a manifestation of an instinctive fear of responsibility for sins?

Yet in the content of the words of the Lord Jesus, what matters for us is not only what horrors and cataclysms will accompany the end of the world. Much more important is the revelation of the end as such. For our attitude toward the horrors and madness that already exist depends substantially on this. It is one thing if this will go on endlessly: our wars, hostility and foolishness, our cruelty and helplessness, only occasionally marked by flights of the human spirit inspired by the touch of the Almighty. It is something altogether different if we believe the Lord's words that against the background of evil's apparent triumph there will come the day of God's victory, the day when the Creator's design will be fulfilled in full. And still more important for us is that this Day of the Lord has already come, when the Savior of the world ascended the Cross for our sake.