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Commentary on the Gospel – November 27, 2025
Salvation Is Always Present
If a catastrophe strikes—a hurricane, an earthquake, or some alarming climate event—or if war breaks out, the most prudent thing to do is usually to hide, look for a safe place, and hope that somehow we make it through.
Today’s Gospel, as so often, gives us a paradoxical recommendation: when you see disasters, catastrophes, wars, and uprisings, instead of hiding in a cave with resigned despair, lift up your head. When you see these things, stand up and raise your heads, because your salvation is near. This is the opposite of what many end-times groups ask people to do: flee to the mountains, hide in caves, and wait for the “rapture,” meaning the taking up of the righteous into heaven while others are condemned. But that is not the vision encouraged here.
Since the earliest days of Christianity, people have been waiting for the Second Coming. And again and again through the centuries we have witnessed catastrophes, violence, wars, disasters, corruption… And again and again Christians are told to lift their heads, because liberation is near. And what happens afterward? Life continues. People rebuild what was destroyed, mourn those who are gone, and sometimes begin from scratch. Non-believers or skeptics may say that we see the same things every year and that this long-announced salvation never arrives. And we ourselves might almost lose heart, waiting for a future coming that seems never to appear. Or is it that we are blind and deaf?
The truth is something else: this salvation is not simply near—it is already here. In these last days of November there is always an apocalyptic and eschatological tone. The truth being proclaimed is that salvation is close—and it truly is. The readings of these days affirm one thing: that the coming Christmas celebrates something for which there is no longer any waiting—the full and definitive salvation that is already here in some way. The promise is real and already fulfilled, even if it is hard for us to see or hear it.
Lift up your head and look: salvation is here. Within; already, and yet not fully.