Liturgical Colour : Green or White (Saturday Mass of our Lady)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day, the last day of our current liturgical year, as is the norms for the Scripture readings taken for these period of time, we always heard about the coming of the end of days, when the devil would amount one last attempt to destroy God’s people and to persecute all the faithful through the means of force, gathering all the forces of the wicked one last time against God and His majesty.

The four great beasts that arose symbolised the powers of this world, the princes and lieutenants of the evil one, and the last of which is the great enemy himself, the devil, Lucifer, once the greatest and mightiest of the angels and creations of the Lord, but who had fallen far in his pride, vanity and greed to be a great demon and destroyer of the world, known by us now as Satan.

And daily, every single day of our lives, Satan and his forces, his fellow fallen angels are battling our guardian angels, the angels sent to protect us, for the sake of our souls, that they may corrupt them and bring us down into damnation together with them in the eternal fire. As he was not able to ascend above the angels of God and seize the throne of God, thus, Satan is filled with hatred and jealousy against all of us, who are God’s most beloved and favoured ones.

And he had attempted many times to bring all of us down with him, beginning from when he seduced our first forefathers into sin, by disobeying the Lord and thus sundered from the love and grace He had given them, and by that, he subjected mankind to himself and to his dominion through sin and evil. And through sin he manipulated mankind that many souls fell into his prey.

He introduced to us many forms of wickedness and sins of this world, engaging us in leisurely and pleasurable pursuits of the flesh, in acts that are against God’s will and in things that distract us and keep us away from being able to understand the truth about how wicked we have become, and how far we have gone astray from the salvation and eternal life in God.

We have to remember the examples of those who lived during the time of Noah, when the Great Flood came to destroy all forms of life and civilisations of those who had been deemed wicked by the Lord. Those people enjoyed life and acted as if God did not exist, and they did not obey the Lord’s commandments and laws but instead following their own hearts’ desires.

And there was indeed no warning to them save for the works of Noah who built the great Ark to save the living animals and beings as instructed by the Lord, and those who ignored the signs shown by the Lord, seeking their repentance surely would have regretted it in hell, when the great flood and rain came to eradicate all of them from existence, and cleanse the earth from their wickedness.

This is a reminder to all of us, to always be ready and be vigilant of all things around us, that we will always guard our thoughts, our words and actions, so that in all things, we will not go against the Lord and we will always walk in His ways faithfully. We must not have the thoughts that we have all the time we need, and as long as we atone in the end, the Lord will forgive us our sins and absolve us into eternal life.

Remember, that Jesus had repeatedly made it clear that His coming again will not come announced and predictable. He will not make His coming known and He can just appear again at any time in accordance with His will. And if His coming, like that of a thief, catch us all unprepared, certainly we will not want ourselves to end up on the wrong side of the Lord’s judgment.

On the day of judgment, God will separate the people and everything into two sides, namely those who have been faithful to Him and walked in His ways, and those who have not been obedient to Him. Those whom He had rejected will have no hope for salvation and no hope for escape from the eternal damnation and the eternal fire that awaits them, to punish them for eternity. We certainly do not want to be caught amongst these condemned ones.

Instead, we all should from now on, from this very moment onwards, strive to do our best in following God in all of His ways. Let us no longer be selfish or greedy in our actions, but learn to do our best in loving each other, caring for the poor, the sick and the dying, and let all of our words and deeds be filled with love, so that when our Lord comes again, He will see the righteousness in us and bless us. God be with us all, now and forever. Amen.