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 did not make death,” says this Sunday’s First Reading. He “created man for incorruption.” In the Gospel Reading, Jesus actually reverses death.
Only God has everlasting life by nature. However, “just as the Father possesses life in himself, so he has granted it to the Son to have life in himself,” Jesus said. The Son is begotten, not made; he has the nature of his Father.
In contrast, we are made by God, not begotten. We do not have God’s nature. However, from the beginning, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “man was destined to be fully ‘divinized’ by God in glory.” That is, God planned to make man divine, like himself: to give man his own nature.
Adam and Eve’s desire to “be like God,” therefore, was in accord with God’s plan. However, “seduced by the devil,” they desired it “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God.” As a result, death entered the world.
However, God did not give up. “The Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature,” says the Catechism.
“For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.”
It then says, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
And “The only begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”
The Catechism is the official compendium of authoritative Church teaching. Here it quotes St. Peter (the first Pope); St. Irenaeus (early second century); St. Athanasius (c 296-373); and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). This is what the Church has always taught.
In baptism, “we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God.” We thus become “gods,” but not the “strange gods” forbidden by the First Commandment, for “we become members of Christ,” who is God the Son. It is “in him” that we partake of God’s nature and can dare to call God “our Father.”
In its 2003 “reflection” on the New Age movement, the Vatican says that “in some ‘classic’ New Age writings, it is clear that human beings are meant to think of themselves as gods: this is more fully developed in some people than in others.”
In these writings, “God is no longer to be sought beyond the world, but deep within myself. Even when ‘God’ is something outside myself, it is there to be manipulated.
“This is very different from the Christian understanding of God as the maker of heaven and earth and the source of all personal life” (that is, the life of persons).
“God is in himself personal, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who created the universe in order to share the communion of his life with creaturely persons” (that is, created persons).
“God, who ‘dwells in unapproachable light,’ wants to communicate His own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only begotten Son. By revealing himself, God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing him, and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity.”
St. John says, “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son,” adding, “I have written this to you to make you realize that you possess eternal life.”
How sad that we can learn our faith as children, pray the second prayer of the Offertory at Mass, listen to the Sunday Readings, and even study the Catechism without realizing this important point!
The Second Reading says that Christ “though he was rich, for [our] sakes became poor, so that by his poverty [we] might become rich.”
“The Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
Father Hawkswell's course, “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” has now ended, but all the materials (video and print) will remain available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until the end of August.