The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity AD 2024

Depending on when Easter falls in one year or another, the number of Sundays after Epiphany and Sundays after Trinity varies. This year there are twenty-six Sundays after Trinity, and that means that the penultimate Sunday of the church year uses the prayers and readings of the sixth Sunday after Epiphany.

This Sunday’s collect focuses on the authority of the Son of God, with which He has destroyed the works of the devil and shows what must happen within us: in the hope of His redeeming and saving grace, we must purify ourselves to be pure like Him.

The devil wants exactly the opposite: the devil doesn’t want our hearts and lives to be pure, but to be stained with sin. The devil also wants to take away our hope in God and His grace in Jesus Christ. The devil wants to mislead and destroy us – through all kinds of false prophets and even false Christs, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel.

False prophets and false Christs mostly have one thing in common: they promise instant miracles and quick solutions. It is true that sometimes things happen suddenly, but mostly the order of creation is such that everything needs time to grow and mature. We – the whole of mankind – too need time to grow and mature, and that is why the return of Christ has now been delayed for almost two thousand years. Not because Christ doesn’t want to fulfill His promise, but because God, in His long-suffering mercy, wants to give as many people as possible the opportunity to repent and be saved.

When Christ returns, there is no need to tell anyone – everyone will see it without a shadow of a doubt: “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”