5th Sunday of Lent, Year A
First Reading: Ez 37:12-14
Second Reading: Rom 8:8-11
Gospel Reading: Jn 11:25, 26
Last Sunday’s readings were about light; this Sunday’s are about life.
“I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people.” “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” “I am the resurrection and the life.”
“Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,” Jesus says, “and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Here Jesus, like St. Paul, speaks of two different kinds of life: natural life, by which we are mortal and subject to death; and supernatural life – eternal life, divine life, everlasting life, God’s life, spiritual life – by which we are immortal and live forever, like God.
The two kinds of life are incommensurable, just as the greatness of space and the greatness of God are incommensurable. The difference is so great that in his Gospel, St. John has two names for them: he calls human life bios and divine life zoë. Bios dimly resembles zoë, but only as a photo resembles a landscape, or a statue resembles a man.
However, Jesus makes us an almost unbelievable offer: that he will, if we let him have his way, let us share his divine life, the life that he has by nature because he is begotten by God the Father, who himself has divine life by nature. If we accept this offer, we too become God’s sons and daughters – no longer just his artifacts.
That is why God the Son became man. “Yes, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not die, but may have eternal life,” St. John says. He came that we “might have life, and have it to the full.” Only Jesus can give us this life: “whoever possesses the Son possesses life; whoever does not possess the Son of God does not possess life.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes the saints: God the Son became man so that we might become “sharers of the divine nature”; “so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God”; “so that we might become God”; “so that he, made man, might make men gods.”
From the very beginning, God planned to make Adam and Eve “gods.” They, too, wanted “to be as gods,” and that is how Satan tricked them, persuading them that they could become “gods” without God, before him, and not in accordance with him.
However, that was not possible. Divine life was not something humans could acquire on their own; it was something they had to be given.
Even before Adam and Eve’s fall, bios had been incommensurable with zoë, but afterward, it was actually opposed to zoë. It became self-centred, wanting to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.
That is the bios Adam and Eve transmitted to all their descendants. It wants to be left alone, to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of God’s world, just as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady was afraid of a bath. We say we want life, and we want it to the full, and “yet,” as Jesus said, “you are unwilling to come to me to possess that life.”
We were reborn with zoë at our baptism. However, through sin – mortal sin – we can let it die; through lack of nourishment, we can let it starve.
Let us, then, especially during Lent, not neglect the sacraments of penance and the Holy Eucharist. Let us pray, as we do in the final prayer of this Sunday’s Mass, that we will remain “in him” as members of his Mystical Body.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights in both print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre (4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and on Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is “How to Go to Confession.”