25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Wis 2:12, 17-20
Second Reading: Jas 3:16-4:3
Gospel Reading: Mk 9:30-37
The lines between Christian and non-Christian are becoming clearer.
We see them when a “celebration of life” that looks back at the life that has ended replaces a Catholic funeral, which looks ahead to the life that continues.
We see them when people resort to suicide to avoid pain, instead of accepting suffering to get closer to God.
We see them when people refuse to make, or keep, promises to be faithful to their spouses until death.
“Worldly” people think they have only one life to live: namely the natural life we were born with, which will end when we die. Christians know we also have another life to live: supernatural life, divine life, God’s life, which is already present and will never end.
St. John calls it zoë. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not die, but may have eternal zoë.” God the Son became man so that we too “might have zoë, and have it to the full.”
“I am the way, the truth, and the zoë,” Jesus said. “Whoever possesses the Son possesses zoë; whoever does not possess the Son of God does not possess zoë.”
John wrote, he says, “to help you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, so that through this faith you may have zoë in his name.”
“This is what we proclaim to you,” he says: “the eternal zoë that was present to the Father and became visible to us. What we have seen and heard we proclaim in turn to you so that you may share zoë with us.”
Quoting the saints, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that God became man in order to make us his children by adoption. It is not just a legal fiction; in adopting us, he makes us “sharers of the divine nature” (as we say in the Offertory at Mass). Quite bluntly, God became Man so that he “might make men gods,” “so that we might become God.”
No other religion makes this claim. (The New Age movement calls us God, but its “God” is pitifully small, and it holds that our human nature contains a “divine spark” that we ourselves can fan into fullness by various techniques.)
“The world” does not like Jesus’ teaching, for it makes us reliant on him for divinity, instead of able to create it for ourselves. (Here we see the same instigation to pride by which Satan deceived Eve.) In fact, “the world” says just what “the godless” say in this Sunday’s First Reading.
Do we, in fact, want Jesus to give us God’s life? We say we want zoë, and want it to the full, and “yet,” Jesus said, “you are unwilling to come to me to possess that zoë.”
Does a baby want to leave the womb? Does a caterpillar want to become a butterfly? Are we like the Israelites who complained that it was better “to be the slaves of the Egyptians than to die in the desert”?
The catch in being “divinized,” as the Catechism calls it, is that we must trust Jesus like a little child; become “last of all and servant of all;” be “pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy;” shun “partiality” and “hypocrisy;” and, above all, shoulder our cross.
However, we believe, with St. Paul, that “the sufferings of the present age” are “as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us.”
This was the belief of St. Charles Lwanga and his companions. As they passed the home of the White Fathers on their 60-kilometre trek to Namugongo to be burned alive, St. James Buzabaliawo, a soldier who had joined them voluntarily, lifted his bound hands and pointed upward, asking, “Why are you so sad? This is nothing to the joys you have taught us to look forward to!”
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.