A Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15 Mark 5:21-43
It is such a bald, uncompromising statement of sacred Scripture.
God did not make death,
Nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living (Wis 1:13).
A preacher is immediately tempted to lower expectations. Everyone dies, even if we spend most of our lives ignoring this truth to the point of exhaustion. But the sage does not tell us that death does not exist. He says that “God did not make death.”
Our lectionary deletes the opening conjunction of this verse, “because,” which links it to the one preceding it. The previous verse tells us that death is a fact of life but one for which we are to blame, not God.
Do not court death by your erring way of life,
nor draw to yourselves destruction by the works of your hands.
Because God did not make death,
nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living (Wis 1:12-13).
So there is a death, but God is not its author. But what is the death for which we are to blame, the one we dare not court lest we bring destruction upon ourselves? There must be more at play here than biological death, which is written into the laws of nature as we know it.
Indeed, there is. If biological death, the natural end of our life on earth, is the only enemy, then we have nothing to fear. We could, like so many of the saints we have known, simply close our eyes as we do at the end of every day and sleep.
The problem is the death that we fashion for ourselves. It precedes natural death, and it is not neutral. When its poison touches biological death, it creates a true terror. Then we rightly fear going down into darkness, a disintegration of all that is good.
Let us call this second death, death as we experience it, “spiritual death.” We need to see its depth of destruction, but this is not easily done. Why? Because the problem with spiritual death—or, to use our old word “sin”—is that it blinds us. We cannot see the sorrow, the exhaustion and the suffering it imposes upon us.
One of our greatest saints is also one of the world’s great authors. In his autobiography, Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo captured the process of spiritual death, even the juncture when his descent into darkness began to give way. The future saint was about to be called into life, a life following a self-inflicted death. Indeed, the experience Augustine records was a new beginning, one that would transform his eventual biological death into a bright portal.
At the point we join his journey, Augustine knows that God is his hope, his salvation. But is God strong enough to free him from the death he courted in an errant way of life, from the destruction that was the work of his own hands? As Augustine put it, “Such was the sickness in which I agonized, blaming myself more sharply than ever, turning and twisting in my chain as I strove to tear free from it completely, for slender indeed was the bond that still held me.”
In hindsight, the man we now call the “Doctor of Grace” suggested that the bond was slender. It did not seem so at the time. His sins seemed to appear to him as seducers.
The frivolity of frivolous aims, the futility of futile pursuits, these things that had been my cronies of long standing, still held me back, plucking softly at my garment of flesh and murmuring in my ear, “Do you mean to get rid of us? Shall we never be your companions again after that moment…never…never again? From that time onward so-and-so will be forbidden to you, all your life long.” And what was it that they were reminding me of by those words, “so-and-so,” O my God, what were they bringing to my mind? May your mercy banish such memories far from me! What foul deeds were they not hinting at, what disgraceful exploits! But now their voices were less than half as loud, for they no longer confronted me directly to argue their case, but muttered behind my back and slyly tweaked me as I walked away, trying to make me look back. Yet they did slow me down, for I could not bring myself to tear free and shake them off and leap across to that place whither I was summoned, while aggressive habit still taunted me: “Do you imagine you will be able to live without these things?” (VIII.11.25-26).
“Do you imagine you will be able to live without these things?” That is indeed the question, and it is so very hard to answer when one is dying from them.
Why are people less religious these days? Why would they prefer to describe themselves as spiritual? Because they do not feel that they need a savior; they do not feel compelled to surrender to his action, his terms. But we have not evolved beyond religion into spirituality. There’s no evolution involved, only devolution, a descent into darkness. Truth be told—and as hard as it is to hear under the reign of sin—we are more dead than previous generations, more blind to the sorrow, the exhaustion, and the suffering we impose upon ourselves. We simply anesthetize ourselves with social media, with consumerism, with chemicals.
If we are going to seek out the spiritually dead, walking in our midst—perhaps ourselves—we need to understand that the issue is a question of sequence. The ordering is not—and never has been:
1) Sin.
2) See the effects of sin.
3) Regret and look for a savior.
4) Find a savior.
5) Live again after sin.
No, the sequence starts with blindness and the entropy that is sin. We do not know that we need a savior until he appears, until we have some hint that life does not need to be this way. Put another way, an awareness of sin only comes with the savior. We do not know how dead we are until we encounter one who has come back from the dead.
It is entirely possible, in previous generations and now, to live one’s life in the bosom of the church and never to know Christ as savior. Though he had not been baptized, Augustine had been raised a Catholic—and by a mother who was a saint!
Again, the Doctor of Grace perfectly illustrates the process described here. In the next paragraph he penned, one sees the entrance of the savior and the recognition of sin and its subsequent death for what they are. And note, ever so well, that the savior comes surrounded by his saints, in the bosom of the church we acclaim as Catholic. He always does.
The taunts had begun to sound much less persuasive, however, for a revelation was coming to me from that country toward which I was facing, but into which I trembled to cross. There I beheld the chaste, dignified figure of Continence. Calm and cheerful was her manner, though modest, sure and honorable her charm as she coaxed me to come and hesitate no longer, stretching kindly hands to welcome and embrace me, hands filled with a wealth of heartening examples. A multitude of boys and girls were there, a great concourse of persons of every age, venerable widows and women grown old in their virginity, and in all of them I saw that this same Continence was by no means sterile, but the fruitful mother of children conceived in joy from you, her Bridegroom (VIII.11.27).
The death we dare not court is spiritual death, and its first symptom is blindness to self-inflicted sorrow. The first gift of the savior, his first remedy, is the restoration of sight, allowing us to see ourselves as lost.
