26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Nm 11:25-29
Second Reading: Jas 5:1-6
Gospel Reading: Mk 9:38-43, 45, 47-48
If your hand, foot, or eye “causes you to stumble, cut it off” or “tear it out,” Jesus said in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading; “it is better for you to enter life maimed” than to have a whole body and end up in hell.
The Second Reading implies the same: if your wealth causes you to stumble, give it away; it is better for you to enter life poor than to be rich and to go to hell. As Jesus warned, “it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Jesus is not commanding self-mutilation. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, the Fifth Commandment forbids amputation and mutilation (including sterilization) except for strictly therapeutic reasons. To understand what Jesus said, recall that after baptism, we live with two kinds of life: natural and supernatural. Natural life is the kind we get from our parents by birth. Supernatural life is the kind God lives in the Holy Trinity. By birth, we have only natural life. To acquire supernatural life, we must be born again, this time with God as our Father and the Church as our mother, so that we become Jesus’ siblings.
This is what happens in baptism. This is why God became man: “so that we might become God,” St. Athanasius said; “so that He, made Man, might make men gods,” St. Thomas Aquinas said.
We can dare to say that in baptism we become gods, for thenceforth we can dare to call God our Father.
Unfortunately, because our race is fallen, our natural life is actually opposed to our supernatural life. Our natural selves resent being raised to the status of gods.
Nonetheless, our supernatural life is infinitely more important than our natural life. Whenever the two clash, it is our natural life that we must suppress.
We may paraphrase what Jesus said as follows: “If anything in your natural life threatens your supernatural life, it would be better to kill it than to lose your supernatural life.” As one of the saints said, “Death, rather than sin.”
Paradoxically, however, it is only when our natural life is killed that it can be raised from the dead.
For a fictitious, but wholly Christian, illustration of death and resurrection, read Chapter 11 of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.
Lewis portrays mortals (who live with natural life only) as ghosts in comparison with gods.
One ghost-mortal has a little red lizard on his shoulder (representing lust) which keeps whispering to him.
“Would you like me to make him quiet?” an angel asks.
“Of course I would,” says the ghost-mortal.
“Then I will kill him,” says the angel. “Have I your permission?”
“It will kill me,” whines the ghost-mortal.
“It won’t,” says the angel. “But supposing it did?”
“You’re right,” says the ghost-mortal. “It would be better to be dead than to live with this creature.”
Next moment the angel grips the lizard, twists its back, and flings it down.
“Ow! That’s done for me!” the ghost-mortal screams.
For a moment nothing happens. Then, there appear, more and more solid every moment, the upper arm and shoulder of a man; then, brighter, and stronger, the legs and hands, the neck, and golden head. A god is made.
Meanwhile, the lizard writhes and struggles on the ground; it even grows bigger. As it grows, it changes. Before long it has become a magnificent stallion. The new-made man, the god, leaps on to its back, riding what had once ridden him.
Mere flesh and blood cannot enter heaven “because they are too weak,” Lewis says. “What is a lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire that will arise when lust has been killed.”
Father Hawkswell’s course “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” will begin again online in YouTube form Sept. 19 free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course.