Homily, 12-10-23; Sunday of the 2nd Week in Advent, Cycle B:
St. Peter, our first pope, tells us in our second reading today that we are to conduct ourselves in holiness and devotion, to be eager to be found without spot or blemish before God, at peace. Holy, devote, obedient, at peace. This is really all we need to remember as we face the troubles of the world, preparing for our last day or the end of the world.
But where is our world headed? It is headed for the end times when Jesus will return, His Second Coming. It will be a time when, after a significant tribulation, we will be caught up with all the risen dead in the clouds to face the Final Judgement. The sheep will be separated from the goats. There will be a new Heaven and a new earth. The sheep will be rewarded with eternal life and the goats will face eternal damnation. But when will this occur?
Jesus tells us that we cannot know the time. He says: “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Mt. 24:36). But He also tells us to look for the signs of the times. He says: “Learn a lesson from the fig tree. When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near. In the same way, when you see all these things, know that he is near, at the gates” (Mt. 24:32-33).
So what are the signs that we are to look for? Jesus says: “You will hear of wars and reports of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for these things must happen, but it will not yet be the end. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be famines and earthquakes from place to place. All these are the beginning of the labor pains” (Mt. 24:6-8).
We can see many of these signs in place now, and we can be tempted to believe that we are approaching the end times. But if we look back in time, there is a long history of wars and natural disasters, and we can imagine that every generation has had some reason to believe they were in the end times. I can remember as a child that there were men walking around carrying signs declaring that the end of the world is near. It’s probably a good thing. It keeps us on our toes. If we think the end is near we will be more inclined to follow the instructions given to us by St. Peter. We will await the coming of the day of God by conducting ourselves in holiness and devotion. We will be “eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.”
Many signs of the end of the world have been evident throughout history, but there are some unique signs that make me wonder if the labor pains leading to the tribulation are intensifying, that we should be especially prepared to face a tribulation that might well be our purgatory on earth. One sign is the increasing disdain for religion and for the morality it demands. Belief in God is being rejected, and those who believe are being persecuted by those who want to act like gods.
I ran across an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal last week by Peggy Noonan. The article was titled: AI Is the Y2K Crisis, Only This Time It’s Real. She writes about all the concern we had with the Y2K issue 24 years ago, and then nothing serious happened. But now, many do not seem very concerned with recent advances in Artificial Intelligence which could have catastrophic outcomes. She quotes Henry Kissinger from earlier this year: “What happens if this technology cannot be completely contained? What if an element of malice emerges in the AI?” She then goes on to write these words: “I’ve written that a great icon of the age, the Apple logo—the apple with the bite taken out of it—seemed to me a conscious or unconscious expression that those involved in the development of our modern tech world understood on some level that their efforts were taking us back to Eden, to the pivotal moment when Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit. The serpent told Eve they would become all-knowing like God, in fact equal to God, and that is why God didn’t want them to have it. She bit, and human beings were banished from the kindly garden and thrown into the rough cruel world. I believe those creating, fueling and funding AI want, possibly unconsciously, to be God, and think on some level they are God.”
Interesting. Will artificial intelligence, will men thinking they are God, lead to the end of the world as we know it. Noonan writes: “What is most urgently disturbing to me is that if America speeds forward with AI it is putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge. And there’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core. They seem apart from the great faiths of past millennia, apart from traditional moral or ethical systems or assumptions about life.” What could possibly go wrong?
And as I read Noonan’s article, I was reminded of a thought-provoking book by C. S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man. I definitely recommend that you read it—I have reread it several times. It is a short book, written in the 1940s, consisting of three prophetic essays that seem to be coming to fulfillment in our time. The last essay, which gives the book its title, deals with man’s effort to conquer nature, regardless of the consequences. He claims that man’s power over nature, is really men exercising power over other men. The claim seems to fit when we consider today’s fight to conquer the climate. And he concludes that: “Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man.” And we can ask if artificial intelligence is how human nature is ultimately conquered?
I cannot help but wonder if artificial intelligence, created by, and in the hands of, godless men, will lead to the end of humanity and ultimately result in the second coming of Christ to restore a new Heaven and a new earth. But I also have to remember that God’s ways are not man’s ways, and there may be a miraculous way out of our current situation that I cannot imagine.
We need to keep watching for signs, but not worrying about knowing the day or hour. We are not in control of that. We must focus on what we can control. We should await the coming of the day of God, whether at the end of time or when God calls us home individually, by conducting ourselves in holiness and devotion. We should be “eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.” We should strive to be among the sheep who will ultimately enter into the new Heaven and the new earth. We should prepare the Way of the Lord, and make straight His paths.