Year of St. Paul - Our Lord, Come!

Our Lord, Come!

At the end of his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul "repeats a prayer of the early Christian communities of Palestine, putting it into the mouths of the Corinthians themselves: 'Maranatha! Our Lord, come!' ... which is also how the Book of the Apocalypse ends. ... Can we pray like this today? In our lives, in our world, it is difficult to pray sincerely for this world to perish, for the coming of the New Jerusalem, the Final Judgment, Christ the Judge. ...

Nonetheless, like the first Christian community we can say: Come Jesus! Of course, we do not want the end of the world to come now. On the other hand, we do want the world of injustice to end, we do want the world to change, the civilization of love to begin, a world of justice and peace to come, a world without violence and hunger. ... But without the presence of Christ a truly just and renewed world will never come".

Pope Benedict XVI General Audience, 12 November 2008