Christian eschatology—and herein lies its uniqueness—has two dimensions. The first is the end of days, spoken of in the Creed as the expectation of the Lord “Who shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.” The second is connected with the fact that...
Christian eschatology—and herein lies its uniqueness—has two dimensions. The first is the end of days, spoken of in the Creed as the expectation of the Lord “Who shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.” The second is connected with the fact that almost every historical era contains a fulfilment, albeit incomplete, of certain eschatological prophecies.
Similarly, philosophy has a conception of a person's death as a continuous process: on the one hand, biological death occurs at a certain moment, but on the other, we change irreversibly every instant, which means that the person we were only recently ceases to exist forever.
The Lord's words are therefore filled with special significance: “Take heed; I have told you all things beforehand.” These words bring salvation not only to those who happen to live at the end of days; they bring salvation to all of us, because we need only look around to see without difficulty false prophets, false christs, and the “abomination of desolation” in the “holy place.” There is, however, no need to explain this to people living after the events of September 11 in the United States of America—after a catastrophe that Americans themselves had predicted down to the details in their cinema. After all, forewarned is forearmed.
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24:28 For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles he gathered together - Our Lord gives this, as a farther reason, why they should not hearken to any pretended deliverer. As if he had said, Expect not any deliverer of the Jewish nation; for it is devoted to destruction. It is already before God a dead carcass, which the Roman eagles will soon devour. Luk 17:37.
24:29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days - Here our Lord begins to speak of his last coming. But he speaks not so much in the language of man as of God, with whom a thousand years are as one day, one moment. Many of the primitive Christians not observing this, thought he would come immediately, in the common sense of the word: a mistake which St. Paul labours to remove, in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. The powers of the heavens - Probably the influences of the heavenly bodies. Mar 13:24; Luk 21:25.