Sunday Mass · 23 November 2025 · XXIV Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday Mass: November 23, 2025 | My Words Shall Not Pass
Bloom’s Sunday Mass, and this is the last one of the Church’s year. Next Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent and the vestments go violet, so this morning closes the long green season—and the Church closes it by reading you twenty-one verses about…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
Communion and close
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Bloom’s Sunday Mass, and this is the last one of the Church’s year. Next Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent and the vestments go violet, so this morning closes the long green season—and the Church closes it by reading you twenty-one verses about the end of everything and then handing you, in Christ’s own voice, the sentence heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass. We offer this Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition—not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, but standing in the same Roman Rite, held by a pastor for whom this tradition has always been home. Beloved, grace and peace to you this morning, wherever you are sitting and whatever kind of week is behind you.
Today is the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, and this year there is no twenty-fifth. It is a second-class Sunday, which means it takes the whole day: Pope Saint Clement the First and Saint Felicity both fall on the twenty-third of November in the calendar, and both give way entirely this morning—neither receives an oration and neither is even commemorated. So there is no saint in this Mass. There is a Sunday at the very end of a year, and there are two readings, and there is an entrance chant you heard a week ago and will hear again in a moment.
This Gospel has a reputation, and many of you will have met it that way first. Matthew twenty-four is the chapter people are frightened with. It has been read at children, quoted at the dying, and used to make a person’s fear the proof that they were taking God seriously.
So hear what the chapter itself says it is for, in the middle of what we read. Behold I have told it to you, beforehand. Read it as the passage giving its own reason for existing, in eight words, and the reason is that you should have been told in advance.
One more thing before we begin. You do not need to believe a word of this for the next half hour to be worth your time. If you were ever taught that being afraid was the same thing as being serious, today’s readings are about you, and the theology is optional.
II
The Penitential Rite
(The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)
We begin the way the Church has always begun—not with achievement, but with an honest accounting. Each of us names what we have done and what we have left undone, in whatever words we actually have, and none of it is said aloud to anybody else.
Take the pause. Today’s Collect is going to ask God to stir us up rather than to sort us out, and that difference is worth carrying into the silence.
III
The Gloria
(The Gloria is sung or said here, from the Missal.)
Then praise, straight after the honesty and never before it. The order is the argument. On the last Sunday of the year the Church still puts the song before the reckoning.
IV
Introit
(Jeremias 29:11-12; 29:14; Ps. 84:2)
(The antiphon is the Missal’s own arrangement, drawn from three places in the twenty-ninth chapter of Jeremias and joined into a single sentence. It is the same entrance chant that opened last Sunday’s Mass, word for word.)
The Lord saith: I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction: you shall call upon me, and I will hear you; and I will bring back your captivity from all places.
℣. Lord, thou hast blessed thy land: thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
Hold that sentence against the Gospel you are about to hear. The Church has put the tribulation and the thoughts of peace in the same twenty minutes, and it did not soften either one to make them fit.
V
Collect
Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people: that, seeking more earnestly the fruit of Thy divine work, they may receive more abundantly the healing effects of Thy goodness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
Stirred up, and then healed. The prayer treats us as people who have gone still rather than as people who have gone wrong.
VI
Epistle
(Colossians 1:9-14, Douay-Rheims)
(The Lesson begins in the middle of the ninth verse. The Douay opens it “Therefore we also, from the day that we heard it,” and the Missal does not sing that clause.)
Brethren: We cease not to pray for you, and to beg that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will, in all wisdom, and spiritual understanding: that you may walk worthy of God, in all things pleasing; being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God: strengthened with all might, according to the power of his glory, in all patience and longsuffering with joy, giving thanks to God the Father, who hath made us worthy to be partakers of the lot of the saints in light: who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins.
VII
Gradual
(Ps. 43:8-9; the address “O Lord” belongs to the Missal’s arrangement rather than to either verse)
Thou hast saved us, O Lord, from them that afflict us: and hast put them to shame that hate us.
℣. In God shall we glory all the day long: and in thy name we will give praise for ever.
VIII
Alleluia
(Ps. 129:1-2)
Alleluia, alleluia. ℣. Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Alleluia.
IX
Gospel
(Matthew 24:15-35, Douay-Rheims)
At that time Jesus said to his disciples: When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand. Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains: and he that is on the housetop, let him not come down to take any thing out of his house: and he that is in the field, let him not go back to take his coat.
And woe to them that are with child, and that give suck in those days. But pray that your flight be not in the winter, or on the sabbath. For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened.
Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him. For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. Behold I have told it to you, beforehand. If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not.
For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be. Wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together.
And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be moved: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all tribes of the earth mourn: and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty. And he shall send his angels with a trumpet, and a great voice: and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the farthest parts of the heavens to the utmost bounds of them.
And from the fig tree learn a parable: When the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know that summer is nigh. So you also, when you shall see all these things, know ye that it is nigh, even at the doors. Amen I say to you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.
X
The Creed
(The Nicene Creed is said here, from the Missal.)
We say it together, out loud, in the same words and at the same speed, whatever each of us is privately able to mean by it this morning. Some of you will say every line as fact. Some of you will say it the way you would hold a door for a stranger. Both of you are saying it.
The Offering
Sunday Homily | My Words Shall Not Pass
The chapter stops in the middle of itself and explains what it is doing.
The chapter stops in the middle of itself and explains what it is doing.
That is unusual, and it is easy to go straight past, because by the time it arrives the room is already braced. Ten verses of abomination, flight, tribulation and shortened days—and then, immediately after the false prophets, one short flat sentence with no drama in it at all. Behold I have told it to you, beforehand.
My words shall not pass.
That is the passage’s own account of its purpose. Not be afraid. Not prove your seriousness. Told, beforehand—the way a doctor tells you what a scan will feel like before you go in, so that you are not also dealing with the surprise.
What the telling is for
Read the sentence as the kind of sentence it is.
It is not a threat, because a threat is issued to change your behaviour under pressure and this one is issued to remove your ignorance. It is a briefing, and it is given to everybody in the room at once, in advance, for free.
My words shall not pass.
And then hear what the last verse does with it. Heaven and earth—the whole set of things that seem permanent, the ground and the sky and the holy place with the abomination standing in it—are put on the perishing side of the sentence. Exactly one item is put on the other side, and it is not the hearer’s faith, not the hearer’s endurance, not the holy place, and not the elect’s record. It is the telling.
Hold onto the shape of that. My words shall not pass.
So the thing the chapter guarantees to outlast the sky is the fact that you were told. It is a strange kind of comfort and it is meant to stay strange: the most durable object in this Gospel is a piece of information already in your possession.
The wonders belong to the other side
Now the verse the whole argument turns on.
For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect.
My words shall not pass.
The spectacle is assigned. Great signs and wonders—the thing that stops a crowd, the thing that raises the hair on your arms, the thing everybody in the room agrees they have never felt before—is given in this verse to the deceivers. Which means that a thing which frightens you or astonishes you is not, by that fact, evidence of anything whatsoever.
My words shall not pass.
If awe were reliable, the passage could have said so. Instead it puts the most awe-producing phenomena in the chapter on the side of the people who are wrong, and leaves the hearer with a sentence and a tree.
And the parenthesis is worth having too. If possible. The verse gets right up to the edge of saying that the elect can be deceived, and then declines to say it. An alarming sentence would have said it.
My words shall not pass.
The mercy is a subtraction of days
There is one mercy stated outright in this Gospel, and it is smaller and stranger than the one people expect.
And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened.
Everything else in this chapter is on a clock, and my words shall not pass.
Not: you will be given strength enough. Not: you will be lifted out of it. Not: the bad days will be made bearable, or meaningful, or instructive. The days will be fewer. The unit of the mercy is time.
My words shall not pass.
And the reason given for it is entirely outside the sufferer. For the sake of the elect—which is to say, the shortening is not something anybody qualified for by holding up well. Nobody in this verse is being assessed. A clock is being adjusted, on somebody else’s account.
Everything the chapter tells the hearer to do is practical in exactly that way. Flee, do not come down for your things, do not go back for your coat, pray that it is not the winter, do not believe that, do not go out there, learn a tree. Not one instruction in twenty-one verses concerns how to feel. Yesterday’s psalm came nearest to it with I was not ashamed, and even that is a report on a standing rather than on a mood.
My words shall not pass.
Where the sign is put
Then the geography of the evidence, which is the other half of the argument.
If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not.
My words shall not pass.
Two claims are refused, and they have a shape in common: both locate the thing somewhere you would have to be taken. Out to the desert, or into an inner room—either way, somebody knows where it is and you do not, and the only way in is through them.
And the answer to both of them is a sentence anybody can carry away: my words shall not pass.
Against that, the two things the chapter does offer. Lightning that comes out of the east and appears in the west, which is to say the whole sky at once, from wherever anybody happens to be standing. And a fig tree with the leaves coming out, which any child in Judea could read without being taught.
My words shall not pass.
The pairing is deliberate and it settles something pastoral. The chapter’s own examples of knowing are the most ordinary and most public objects available—weather and a tree—and its examples of things to disbelieve are all announcements that require an insider. On Tuesday we sat with a sentence about a place that this place was made by God, said over any building at all; here is the same instinct working on knowledge instead of on rooms.
The same chant, twice
One more thing before the naming, and it is about what the Church put around this Gospel rather than what is in it.
Five of the ten texts of this Mass are word for word last Sunday’s. The entrance chant, the Gradual, the Alleluia verse, the Offertory and the Communion antiphon are all identical to the ones sung a week ago today at the Mass we called thoughts of peace. The Collect, the Lesson, the Gospel, the Secret and the Postcommunion are today’s own.
My words shall not pass.
So the Church took the frame that held a Gospel about a quiet woman on a road and put the identical frame around the desolation of the holy place. I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction, at the door of this one too. Out of the depths I have cried to thee, twice, before the reading and again over the bread. And on the way out, all things whatsoever you ask when you pray, believe that you shall receive.
My words shall not pass.
Nothing was swapped for a sterner text. Whatever else this morning is, the Church did not think this Gospel needed different music.
What the fear was for
Now the harm, because the readings have already done the work of exposing it.
There is a way of teaching the faith that runs on fear, and Matthew twenty-four is its favourite chapter. It teaches that terror is the appropriate response to God, that a person who is not frightened is not paying attention, and that the fear itself is the evidence of sincerity. It is very effective, and it has been for a long time.
My words shall not pass.
I am naming who this lands on. People who were brought in by being told what would happen to them, at an age when they had no way to check. People who cannot pray now without first running a check on whether they are in danger. People who left, and who still find their pulse going up at a certain kind of sentence, years after they stopped believing any of it.
None of that came out of this chapter, and my words shall not pass.
The Gospel forecloses it from inside, and it does so three times over. The wonder-and-terror machinery is assigned to the deceivers. The mercy is a subtraction of days rather than an increase in dread. And the chapter’s own stated reason for existing is that you should have been told beforehand—which is a thing you do for somebody in order to make them less afraid, not more.
My words shall not pass.
On Thursday we heard Christ open a Gospel with fear not, little flock, and the difference between that day and this one is worth stating. That day asked whether an act done while you felt nothing still counted. Today asks whether the feeling was ever the point—whether fright was the engine, or whether it was only ever the weather you were being warned about.
My words shall not pass.
Apply the fruit test to Christianity’s own record and ask what fear-run faith has grown. It has grown adults who flinch at scripture. It has grown people who confess the same thing for thirty years because the relief never holds. It has grown a great many who walked out and could not say what they had walked out of, and a great many more who stayed and never once relaxed.
My words shall not pass.
A hatch, and three people waiting
There is a story sometimes told of a woman of thirty-four with a muscle condition that has been getting slowly worse since she was nineteen.
She lives with her father, who drives her most places, and on the mornings he is at work she uses a minicab firm two streets over. Winter is the hard part. The cold takes her legs before it takes anything else, standing at a window to look out for a car is not available to her, and a driver who sounds the horn and leaves after forty seconds costs her the whole appointment.
My words shall not pass.
What she did was go into the office and say the whole of it at the hatch. Not on the telephone, not in a letter, not to the one driver she trusted—at the sliding window, on a Tuesday morning, with three people on the plastic chairs behind her waiting for their own cars. She said what the condition was, what the cold does, how long she needs, and that she was not asking to be taken for nothing and was not asking for fewer journeys.
My words shall not pass.
She asked for two things. That whoever comes rings the bell rather than sounds the horn. And that her appointments be booked out of January and February wherever the surgery will allow it, because it is not the journey that defeats her, it is the January.
My words shall not pass.
That is the Gospel’s own prayer, said at a hatch. But pray that your flight be not in the winter. The passage does not have them praying to be spared the flight. It has them praying about the conditions of it—the season, the day of the week—which is a smaller and far more usable request.
My words shall not pass.
She said it in front of strangers on purpose, because the version said quietly to one kind driver leaves when that driver does. Her father was not in the room, and she did not do it anywhere it could be treated as a favour owed back later.
I am not going to tell you it worked out, because it mostly did not. They rang the bell for about five weeks. The surgery moved two appointments out of five that year, and the following winter the booking system changed and it went back to January. Nothing in this story gets fixed.
What she did first was tell them, and my words shall not pass.
Where this leaves us
So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room on the last Sunday of the year.
If you were formed by fear, you were not formed by this chapter. You were formed by somebody’s use of it, and the chapter says out loud that it was told to you in advance so that you would not be caught out—and then puts every frightening spectacle in it on the side of the people who are lying to you.
My words shall not pass.
And take the tense of the Lesson with you, because it does the same work from the other end. Paul does not ask that the Colossians be rescued; he reports it in the past. God hath made us worthy, hath delivered us from the power of darkness, hath translated us. The rescue is old news, and the only things he asks for are patience, longsuffering and thanks—which are what you need when a settled matter is taking a long time to feel settled.
My words shall not pass.
On the eighth of this month we prayed to be delivered from present sorrow, a sorrow with no event attached to it and no end date given. This morning’s Lesson puts the delivering in the perfect tense and leaves the sorrow in the present, and does not apologise for the gap. That gap is where a great many people actually live, and neither reading treats it as a failure.
My words shall not pass.
The sky in this Gospel comes apart. The ground goes, and so does the holy place itself. And the one thing left standing, on the chapter’s own accounting, is that somebody told you in advance and did not leave you to find out.
My words shall not pass. Beforehand, and to you.
↑ The order resumes below.
XII
Offertory
(Ps. 129:1-2)
Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord.
XIII
Secret
Be merciful, O Lord, to our humble requests, and accept the offerings and prayers of Thy people: turn the hearts of us all unto Thee, that, freed from earthly craving, we may pass over to heavenly longing. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
XIV
The Canon and Consecration
(The Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, the Sanctus, and the Canon through the Consecration are prayed here, from the Missal, and the Consecration made within Bloom’s own Independent Catholic tradition.)
We come to the part of the Mass that stops explaining itself. The Church simply does what it was given to do, in words it has used for centuries, offered as a real celebration within our own tradition and not a claim on anybody else’s.
Whatever you carried in—the sentence that still tightens your chest, the winter you can already feel coming, the settled thing that has never once felt settled—put it on the altar. This is a table where ordinary material is taken seriously, and you qualify as ordinary material.
XV
Act of Spiritual Communion
No livestream can hand anyone a host. That is true of every Mass offered over video, anywhere, by anyone. So the Church’s own long-standing practice stands in, the same one bishops recommended to their parishes joining from home.
My Jesus, I believe that Thou art truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love Thee above all things and I desire to receive Thee into my soul. Since I cannot now receive Thee sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace Thee as if Thou wert already there, and unite myself wholly to Thee. Never permit me to be separated from Thee. Amen.
If you cannot say that this morning, sit quietly through it. You are not receiving less by being here differently.
XVI
Communion Antiphon
(Mark 11:24; the Missal’s antiphon opens “Amen I say to you” and closes “it shall be done to you,” where the Douay of the verse reads “Therefore I say unto you” and “they shall come unto you”)
Amen I say to you, all things whatsoever you ask when you pray, believe that you shall receive, and it shall be done to you.
Hear what the Church puts in your ear on the way out of this particular Gospel. Not a threat. An instruction to ask, and a promise attached to the asking.
XVII
Postcommunion
Grant us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that all evil in our hearts may be cured by the healing power of the sacrament which we have received. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
XVIII
The Closing Blessing
(Given as Bloom’s own pastor, within Bloom’s own tradition)
Go now, and go forewarned.
If you believe this morning: the year ends with a chapter about everything coming apart, and the Church files it under an entrance chant in which God’s stated thinking towards you is peace and not affliction. The two are not in tension. Being told what is coming, in advance, by somebody who intends to be there, is not the same as being threatened, and the whole difference between the two is the reason this Gospel exists at all.
And if you believe none of it, take the same thing with the theology removed. Fear is a very good way to fill a room and a very poor way to keep anybody in it, and if you were recruited by fright you were sold something that was never on the label. You are allowed to walk back toward the parts of this that are true without carrying the parts that were only ever pressure applied to a child.
May God, whose thoughts towards you are of peace and not of affliction, shorten whatever days need shortening, hear you out of whatever depth you are calling from, and hold you to the end of a year and into the next one.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Go, and say the whole of it out loud.
XIX
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Today is the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, and the very next Sunday, the thirtieth of November, is the First Sunday of Advent—first class, violet, and the beginning of a new liturgical year. So this morning is the last of the green Sundays, which is part of why the readings are what they are.
Because half of it is last Sunday’s, word for word. The Introit, Gradual, Alleluia verse, Offertory and Communion antiphon are identical to the Twenty-Third Sunday’s; the Collect, Lesson, Gospel, Secret and Postcommunion are proper to today. Five texts repeat and five are new, and the Church made no substitution to suit a harder Gospel.
The Mass offers no interpretation of it, and the chapter itself gives three of its verses to warning you off anybody who claims to know where he is. What it does say is that the hearer has been told beforehand, that great signs and wonders are the work of the deceivers, and that the days will be shortened. Today’s reading also stops before the verse in which Christ says that of the day and the hour no one knows.
Because a second-class Sunday takes the whole day. Both fall on the twenty-third of November in the calendar, and both are displaced by the Sunday rather than reduced to a commemoration—so neither receives an oration and neither is mentioned in the propers. The texts prayed this morning are the Sunday’s own from start to finish, and it is worth knowing when that happens.
No, and we say so every week. Bloom offers Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition, following the 1962 Roman Rite, and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Old Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities have used the word honestly in exactly this position for well over a century, and so do we.
No. The argument holds with the theology taken out: a warning given in advance, for free, to everybody in the room is a different object from a threat, and a fright is not evidence. Anyone who was brought into anything by being scared of what happened if they left already recognises the shape. Bloom’s whole thesis fits in three words—truth, love, acceptance—and belief was never the entry fee.
Faith in Bloom is the daily liturgical work of Bloom Ministries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and it is free to read and always will be. If it has been worth something to you and you are able, you can give once or give monthly below. Sending a post to one person who needs it does real work too.
Epistle and Gospel text: Douay-Rheims Bible, Bishop Challoner revision—the standard English scripture translation used across traditional hand missals. Introit, Collect, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, Secret, Communion antiphon, and Postcommunion: the Missale Romanum (1962), the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, following The New Marian Missal for Daily Mass by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M., S.T.D. (Regina Press, Imprimatur 1961).
Faith in Bloom, under the Church of Bloom, is a ministry of Bloom Ministries, a nonprofit organization tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It is offered in the Independent Catholic tradition and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
