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00:00How are you, dear friends?
00:30Dear brothers and sisters, welcome back to the virtual classroom of Active Evangelization.
00:35Now that we are finishing our course on Pauline spirituality within this whole project of our class on the Pauline writings.
00:45And well, in this last chapter we are going to talk, we are going to finish on a very important topic, it is a very exciting topic of the apostle since it points precisely to being eternally with Christ.
01:01Eschatology, which is the life that the Lord promises us, and so Saint Paul himself tells us in his first letter to the Thessalonians, because there in chapter 4 he tells us that we will always be with the Lord.
01:16And so we will always be with the Lord.
01:19And this is fascinating because eschatology is the permanent reference to an absolute and transcendent future that is God and that leads us to fully grasp the meaning and purpose of man, of history and ultimately, of the cosmos.
01:37The eschatological dimension, especially in the New Testament, appears as a dynamic structure of the very historical being of man that impels him towards a transcendent and wonderful destiny that has been promised by Christ to all those who, remaining faithful to his word, live according to the Gospel and serve their brothers with all their heart.
02:03Let us then talk about this end, this end that awaits all of us Christians who have lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
02:15This final dimension of man involves two aspects.
02:19One that unfolds in heaven where everything is peace, joy, endless bliss, but on the other hand, it has the aspect of leading to darkness, to eternal damnation.
02:34So eschatology has an end that for some may be one of great joy, of eternal bliss, but for others may be one of eternal damnation.
02:48That is why our life is important, and why it is also important to know what God offers us.
02:54We can say then that eschatology is a consequence of human being and action in relation to God.
03:02In other words, it is humanly inevitable that man will die and that this death will place him in a dimension where all things will change, and this will be definitive and eternal.
03:14There is no way this will not happen to man.
03:17That is why eschatology, or the end, is destiny, but it is also a free vocation of man.
03:26For man, in his freedom, will have, despite having been called to share in eternal joy,
03:35that man will have to choose the form and destiny he desires for himself in this new stage of his existence.
03:42I say, frequently in this life we are choosing and we are putting our eternal reality at stake.
03:52In a few years, the one who lives the longest, the scripture says, will be one hundred.
03:57And in this small span of time, eternity is at stake.
04:03That's why it's important to be aware of this topic and keep it in mind, because we are the ones who have to decide.
04:12It is a vocation, God has called us to it, but it is a free decision and choice of each one of us.
04:20whether we want to accept God's plan to live with him eternally or whether we prefer to turn away from him from this earth and live eternally without him.
04:31This new reality presents itself to us as a mystery that we cannot penetrate on our own.
04:38It is therefore necessary that God reveal this dimension to us.
04:42It is precisely in this revelation that man must develop faith, that very faith and hope that will shape our destiny
04:55as the guarantee of what is expected, the proof of realities that are not seen.
05:01In the eschatological event of Jesus, Paul, with all the apostolic tradition expressed in the ancient creeds or symbols of faith,
05:13It distinguishes, but does not separate, in the one mystery of Christ the two moments of Christian faith and hope,
05:22the Easter Christ and the Christ of the Paruchia.
05:26The resurrected, dead Christ is the center and foundation of faith, hope, and love.
05:34It is the fundamental theological element that is within the theology of the Pauline and Apostolic gospel.
05:43We can see this in the main Pauline letters and constantly throughout the Pauline corpus.
05:50Well, it would suffice to review 1 Thessalonians, in chapter 1, verse 10 already speaks of this.
05:58The same is true in chapter 4, verse 14, in First Corinthians, in chapter 15,
06:04In Romans it starts from chapter 1, in Galatians it also starts in chapter 1,
06:11in Colossians chapter 2, Ephesians chapter 1.
06:14That is, if we can see, on the other hand, the immediate expectation of the Christ of the Parucía,
06:23It is equally important throughout the Pauline quaerigma.
06:27It contains the joyful and eucharistic invocation of the apostolic church of Jerusalem.
06:33This has been the cry, the continuous expectation of the church that is always attentive to the return of its Messiah, its Lord.
06:49It is for all these reasons that Pauline texts on the final resurrection are so numerous.
06:56We would base our discussion on the most famous ones.
07:00We have, for example, 1 Thessalonians 4, 13, 18 and 1 Corinthians 15,
07:07which are frequently references to the consummation of the kingdom and the new creation,
07:14which shows that Pauline eschatology has an eschatological face
07:19And that both moments of Christ, the Paschal and the Parousia, while distinct, are inseparable,
07:29as is evident in 1 Thessalonians 1:10.
07:34I would like you to open your Bible now and let's go to this text from Thessalonians 1:10.
07:40In this text we find the following.
07:43And to wait for his Son Jesus, who is to come from heaven, whom he raised from the dead.
07:51and that saves us from the coming wrath.
07:55As we see in this text, the expectation of the Christian community is that Maranatha.
08:03That is, the waiting for Jesus Christ, who, as this text says, is to come in glory from heaven.
08:11This Jesus whom God raised from the dead.
08:14And that is what the church, we, you and I, are still waiting for today.
08:20That is why when we go to each Eucharist, at the end of the consecration we say,
08:26Come Lord Jesus, we are waiting for you, don't delay any longer.
08:31This is the central part of our entire life as Christians.
08:37The glorious expectation of Jesus, which for some will be at the end of time, when all that has been created is finished.
08:46But for others, which is most likely what will happen to us, it will be at the moment of our death.
08:52And now let's look at some of the main points of Pauline eschatology.
08:58Parucía is a word that comes from Greek and means the same thing, arrival as coming.
09:12In other words, parucía means arrival, but it also means coming.
09:16In biblical texts it is always referred to the second coming of Christ.
09:21It appears four times in 1 Thessalonians.
09:26We could say that it is one of the writings in which it appears most often.
09:31The first idea that Saint Paul presents to us in his letter to the Thessalonians,
09:35It is the fact of waiting for Jesus to come from heaven.
09:40If you like, let's go to this text from Thessalonians.
09:44Let's go to this text.
09:46They themselves tell us how we came into your lives.
09:50and how they converted to God after abandoning idols to serve the living and true God
09:58and thus await his Son Jesus, who is to come from heaven,
10:03to whom he raised from the dead and who saves us from the wrath to come.
10:08This text, which we had already mentioned in its final part,
10:12We see the firm belief that Christ's promise to return
10:18It completely permeated the thinking of the evangelization of the first community.
10:25Along with this, the kerygma concerning the death and resurrection of Christ is faithfully expressed.
10:31In other words, the one who is to come is the same one who died and who now lives for all eternity.
10:37This coming is what will cleanse us from the wrath to come.
10:42This is an expression that has been much discussed and, above all, is not very clear.
10:48However, with this expression St. Paul is already referring to the experience of the Old Testament.
10:55the purifying action that God will perform in the people.
11:00And this is not new, since Jesus himself had already spoken about it.
11:04when he tells the last parable of the parabolic section of Matthew
11:09where at the end of the fishing the fish are separated, the bad ones are thrown away and the good ones are collected in baskets.
11:17In this now parabolic view, someone might say, well, grab and throw away all the trash.
11:23No, I mean, they're fish, they're useless fish, but in this sense they're not useful to us.
11:32It is not that He rejects them, but rather that would be a consequence, a consequence of their lack of conversion.
11:39And for that, we have to take into account the entire parabolic analysis
11:43the apostle has been doing in this section
11:48to understand that it is a consequence of my lack of conversion.
11:54Now, regarding the moment when this paruchia should occur,
11:59The apostle thought it was imminent and that he himself would be alive to participate in it,
12:05as it tells us in First Thessalonians, in chapter 4.
12:10I invite you to watch this quote, which is very important.
12:14because it helps us understand this element of the paruching
12:18which was expected to be imminent and which, ultimately, is not.
12:23Chapter 4, First Thessalonians.
12:26Let's go to verse 15.
12:28This text tells us,
12:30We tell you this as the word of the Lord.
12:33We who are alive, who remain until the coming of the Lord,
12:39We will not go before those who have died.
12:42The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud cry,
12:46with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God,
12:49And those who died in Christ will rise first.
12:53Then, we, those of us who live, those of us who remain,
12:57We will be caught up together with them in the clouds.
13:02We will all go together to meet the Lord in the air.
13:08This quote tells us precisely how the end was already imminent.
13:15People were already expecting Jesus' return.
13:19In this quote we mainly point out that certainly not everyone is going to die.
13:28In other words, there will be some people who will remain at the end of time.
13:33But, Paul says, no one will get ahead of him because at the same time the dead will rise.
13:39And those of us who are alive at that time will also be taken along with those who died first.
13:48And we will all be reunited in heaven.
13:51In 1 Corinthians 15, verse 51, it states the following.
13:57In other words, at this moment all the dead will rise,
14:23They will recover their flesh, their bones, we will be again what we have always been.
14:30This body, as we see it now, will be resurrected, although with different characteristics.
14:37But anyway, we'll continue talking about this topic as soon as we return from our break.
14:42I'll wait for you in a moment.
14:53Thank you.
14:54Thank you.