Eclipsing the cynics

By: Greg Maresca

The week before the recent solar eclipse, an extensive nor’easter disabled power to hundreds of thousands. On the Friday before the celestial happenings, a rare 4.8 earthquake centered in New Jersey shook a good part of the Northeast just days after a much larger quake in Taiwan – 7.4 magnitude – collapsed buildings resulting in at least 13 deaths.

Then on Monday, the anticipated full solar eclipse occurred on the Catholic feast of the Annunciation, where Our Lord’s Blessed Mother was overshadowed by the power of the Most High (Luke 1:35).  Later that day, at sunset, commenced the Jewish observance of Passover. 

G.K. Chesterton wrote that coincidences are spiritual puns.

And those spiritual puns just kept coming.  

Seven days before Easter we experienced a lunar eclipse and then seven days after the Christian high holy day – a complete solar eclipse.  According to Cosmos magazine, the geometry of the Earth’s and moon’s orbit in relationship to the sun will undergo a total solar eclipse only once every 375 years.

The eclipse’s path was roughly a 115-mile-wide band stretching from Mexico to Canada – passing through more than a dozen U.S. states including seven towns named Nineveh.  Nineveh is an ancient city in modern-day Iraq portrayed in the Bible as evil. 

Naysayers claimed it wasn’t seven, but two places called Nineveh – one would have sufficed for me. Who knew there were that many?  The urge for some folks to explain away such anomalies as mere happenchance only grows in a nation that dismisses daily its Judeo-Christian heritage.    Transgender Visibility Day supplanted Easter Sunday the holiest day of Christendom at the White House thanks to that devout Catholic of a president, who at 81 desires four more years.

The last eclipse in 2017 ran through seven venues named Salem which means peace. When juxtaposed together both eclipses form a cross. Both lasted three hours and were separated by seven years. The number seven’s Biblical meaning is perfection, while three has its own significance being the number of hours Jesus hung on the cross when the most infamous of all eclipses occurred only to rise from the dead three days later.   

Applying the chronological date to Exodus 4:8: “So if they will not believe you nor pay attention to the evidence of the first sign, they may believe the evidence of the last sign.”

Not to be outdone, two days after the solar eclipse, a bright fireball raced across the skies over New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Solar eclipses are exceptional cosmic occurrences that point to God and His glory underscoring just how immense and precise celestial movements are.  After all, it was the Star of Bethlehem that led the wisemen to the infant Jesus.

The day before the 2024 eclipse, Catholics observed Divine Mercy Sunday as a reminder of God’s mercy. For many this begged the question could Monday’s eclipse be a sign of God’s impending judgment?  

Many ancient civilizations believed eclipses were a divine message and, in many instances, a warning. 

Some contemporaries agree. 

All of this speaks to my Catholic sensibilities.

Without exception every prediction and prognostication about the Second Coming has been wrong.  I suppose the folly of date-setting is all part of our fallen nature and the inherent need for control. Misunderstanding has always been at the forefront of such forecasts that the first coming of Christ was mostly dismissed.    

As you read this, we have never been closer than right now “for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Rom. 13:11), but this has been true all throughout the Christendom epoch.

Just because we are closer does not mean we are close.

Scripture continuously emphasizes that the “day and hour no one knoweth, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone.” And the day of the Lord will come “like a thief in the night” and “it is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.”

We will not know the day, nor the hour but since the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have been in the end times. 

Through free will we are presented a choice: to cooperate with God’s grace or not.

And for whatever a man sows; he will reap.

~ Maresca is a longtime columnist living in Flyover, Pennsylvania.