Death was not part of God’s plan

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 created us for incorruption”; it was “through the devil’s envy” that “death entered the world,” teaches the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

At the creation of Adam and Eve, God’s favour irradiated every dimension of their human life: they enjoyed unbroken harmony within themselves, with each other, and with the rest of creation. By their human nature, they could expect to die, but God called them to share, by knowledge and love, in his own divine life, which is unending.

However, humans could not be friends with God as equals; their playing field could not be level. As created beings, dependent on their Creator, they had moral and physical limits which they had to recognize and respect, symbolized by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Living in friendship with God, therefore, meant living in free submission to him. For Adam and Eve, this was not the constant difficulty it is for us. In a joy and ease which extended to all their faculties and senses, they enacted continuously the filial self-surrender which our Lord enacted on the cross.

We do not know how long they continued in their original innocence, but sooner or later they sinned. Tempted by the devil, first Eve and then Adam freely refused to submit to God. Wanting to decide good and evil for themselves, they stopped trusting God for their happiness and disobeyed him.

As a result, they lost their familiarity with God, the control of their souls’ spiritual faculties over their bodies, their marital harmony, and their harmony with the rest of creation. Finally, they incurred the consequence God had explicitly foretold: creation became subject to decay, and death made its entrance into human history.

Their fall is “the key to history,” said C.S. Lewis. “Terrific energy is expended – civilizations are built up – excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.”

The doctrine of the original sin explains everything, said the English poet Coleridge; without it, “man is unintelligible.”

It explains our own behaviour. “I do not do the good I will to do, but the evil I do not intend,” St. Paul said. Think of the love with which a marriage begins, and of the selfishness which so often corrupts it. It also explains the behaviour of so-called “innocent” babies and children; just listen to an infant’s scream of pure egoism or watch a youngster’s efforts to get around his parents’ rules.

It is, indeed, a fallen world.

However, as we hear in the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer, God has not abandoned humans to the power of death, but helps us all to seek and find him.

For our sake, God the Son became man in the person of Jesus Christ. He was so full of life that when he touched a sick woman, her hemorrhage stopped; when he touched a dead body, it came back to life; when he wanted to die, he had to be killed.

Even when his own body and soul were separated in death, they remained united to the person of God the Son, and so his corpse did not decay: instead, he rose from the dead.

God has not erased the choice made by Adam and Eve – for he respects the freedom he gave them – but he has given us a second chance. He presents us with the choice he offered Adam and Eve: to enroll in the devil’s company and experience everlasting death, or to allow Christ, through his Church’s sacraments, to graft us on to himself like a branch onto a vine so that, with him (or rather, in him, as members of his mystical body) we can rise from death and enjoy the eternal life for which he created us.