13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Wis 1:13-15; 2:23-24 
Second Reading: 2 Cor 8:7,9,13-15
Gospel Reading: Mk 5:21-43

“God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living,” we hear in this Sunday’s liturgy. “For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them.”

Jesus said that he had come into the world that we “might have life, and have it to the full.” Accordingly, he gave life to Jairus’ daughter and healed the woman afflicted with a hemorrhage.

But it is not just ordinary human life (in Greek, bios) that he offers us. “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity,” says the First Reading.

“God gave us eternal life” (in Greek, zoë) St. John says, “and this life is in his Son. Whoever possesses the Son possesses life; whoever does not possess the Son of God does not possess life.”

We all want life, and life with “quality,” but, as Jesus said, we are “unwilling” to come to him “to possess that life.” We hear him proclaim that the poor, hungry, and persecuted are, in reality, “blessed,” and he seems to thwart our desire for fullness of life.

C.S. Lewis explains. Suppose you take a dog on a leash through a turnstile. He tries to go through on the wrong side and gets his leash looped round the post.

Both you and he want to let him go forward. For that very reason you, seeing the futility of his way, pull him back. But he, thinking he knows how to get what he wants, resists your pull, or yields to it reluctantly, unwillingly, as a matter of duty.

“I understand, and share, your desire to go forward,” we would like to tell him. “I also understand your resistance to the leash, but I cannot share it, precisely because I understand and share your real desire. In fact, the more I sympathize with your real desire, the less I can sympathize with your resistance.”

God understands and shares our desire for fullness of life, complete and ecstatic happiness. That is what he made us for. At his right hand are “pleasures forevermore.” However, he knows that our efforts to seize them actually put them further out of reach.

For example, take a sin of lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture is good, created by God. “I know that we have won many a soul through pleasure,” says Lewis’ imaginary devil Screwtape. “All the same, it is his invention, not ours.” All the devil can do is encourage us to seize that pleasure in the wrong way. By the time the pleasure arrives, the sin “is already over,” Screwtape says; the devil regrets the pleasure and would exclude it if he could.

If we will only trust God, submit to the leash, and come round to the right side of the post, God will give us what we really wanted all along. It will be the real thing, not a consolation prize or a substitute. If we knew it, we would not have to fight sensuality as something impure; we would spontaneously reject it as something dull, cold, abstract, and artificial.

Lewis calls God “the all-punishing, all-pardoning Father.” He is “all-punishing,” because the more he loves us, the more determined he is to pull us back from our way, which leads nowhere, into his way, which leads where we want to go. He is “all-pardoning,” for every time we try to go the wrong way, he forgives us, extricating us even when we have wound the whole leash around the post.

God knows what we really want, even in our worst sins, and he longs to give it to us. However, he knows that only by his way can we possibly get it. Anyone who tries to get it “my way” will find only hell.