The Catholic faith is paradoxical

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Is 50:5-9
Second Reading: Jas 2:14-18
Gospel Reading: Mk 8:27-35

“Whoever wants to become my follower, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” Jesus says in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading. “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake... will save it.”

Paradoxically, we have to die in order to live. If we try to live on our own, we will die.

Even Peter, who, inspired by God the Father, had just realized who Jesus was, did not understand this.

The Catholic faith is full of such paradoxes. For example, love runs counter to self-seeking: it is an exodus out of ourselves. Nevertheless, paradoxically, it is precisely the way in which we find ourselves, for love is what God made us for.

The beatitudes, which lie at the heart of Jesus’ teaching, are fundamentally paradoxes. If you are poor, sad, persecuted, insulted, or slandered, the world will call you unfortunate, but you should consider yourself blest. If you are meek, merciful, or peaceable, the world will call you weak, timid, or lazy, but you should consider yourself blest. If you are hungry for righteousness or single-hearted in your devotion to God, the world will call you unrealistic and impractical, but you should consider yourself blest.

“As soon as things are seen in the right perspective,” in terms of God’s values, “the standards of the world are turned upside down,” said Pope Benedict XVI. Those who are “poor in worldly terms” are “the truly fortunate ones.” Those whom the world thinks pitiable are the ones God has blest.

I once urged an elderly woman to return to the practice of her Catholic religion. She replied, “Father, I don’t need it.” Presumably, she will not turn back to God as long as she thinks she has everything she needs—wealth, health, friends, reputation, etc.

However, God, who made her, knows that if she loses him, she will have lost everything. Accordingly, in his mercy and love, he takes away her wealth, health, and friends, and instead blesses her with poverty, infirmity, and neglect.

The dangers of false self-sufficiency explain why Jesus regarded the vices of prostitutes so much more leniently than the worldly vices. Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so attractive or satisfactory that they will not turn to God, but the proud, avaricious, and self-righteous are.

The ultimate paradox is the one in this Sunday’s readings: Jesus’ crucifixion, in which he accepted the disgrace of death in complete and free submission to his Father’s will.

By his obedience, he undid Adam’s rebellion and made death, the consequence of that rebellion, an instance of the free submission to God which Adam had refused. Thus the obedience of Jesus transformed the curse of death into a blessing.

Death had been Satan’s master stroke against the human race; God made it the weapon by which he defeated Satan. Like a good general or a master chess player, he took the strong point of his opponent’s plan and made it the pivot of his own.

“It was death alone that won freedom from death, and death itself was its own redeemer,” St. Ambrose said. Christ “could have found no better means to save us than by dying.”

Now, through the sacraments, the Church offers us the chance to share in Christ’s death. If we do, we transform our own death into an act of obedience and love toward God the Father. Now, therefore, death is not only a consequence or punishment for our fallen condition: it is also the medicine or remedy. Welcomed with humility and self-renunciation, it undoes the rebellion which brought death as a consequence and merited death as a punishment.

“God did not decree death from the beginning,” St. Ambrose said. “He prescribed it as a remedy.”