The Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time [B]
Wisdom 1:13-15;2:23-24  +  2 Corinthians 8:7,9,13-15  +  Mark 5:21-43 [or Mark 5:21-24, 35-43]

There are certain seasons of the Church Year, and certain times of that year, when we expect that certain beliefs of our Faith will come to the forefront.  For example, during Lent, and even more so the closer we draw to Good Friday, we expect to hear about—and to be challenged to reflect upon—the sacred Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Likewise, in the last Sundays of the Church Year, during the month of November, the Scriptures at Mass draw our attention to what Holy Mother Church calls the “Four Last Things”.  One of those four Last Things is death, and of course November—as nature all around us becomes colder and more barren, with fields and lawns turning yellow—is a fitting time to reflect upon death.

But this Sunday?  We’re in the heart of summer.  The days are filled with light and heat.  Fields and lawns are lush and green.  Why do our Scriptures today focus upon the harsh reality of human death?

Maybe it’s to remind us that death is often not predictable.  Reflecting upon death during Lent and November is fitting and timely.  But death often strikes unexpectedly, at a time that seems altogether unfitting.  Maybe that’s why on this Summer morning Holy Mother Church wants us to reflect upon death through the light of the Gospel.

+     +     +

In today’s First Reading, from the Old Testament Book of Wisdom, the author states:  “God did not make death, nor does He rejoice in the destruction of the living.”

But if God did not make death, then who did?  The answer is:  man made death; or at least, man made death into what we know it as.

“In the beginning”, when God created man—male and female He created them—He did not design man to experience death as we know it.  Certainly, God never intended man to live forever upon the earth.  But God did not design man to end his earthly days by means of what we know as death.

“In the beginning”, God created man so that an individual human person, upon reaching his or her final day on earth, would rise to Heaven both in body and soul, as the Blessed Virgin Mary did at the end of her days on earth.  As God originally designed man, the end of earthly life would not have resulted in the division of a man’s body from his soul.  The human body and soul were meant always to be united to each other:  both on earth and in Heaven.

But when Adam and Eve brought sin into human life, death as we know it resulted.  Human sin is the reason that the body and soul are separated from each other at the moment of death.  They remain separated, of course, until the end of time.  St. Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, writes that at the end of time “the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible” [1 Corinthians 15:52].  Those in Heaven will finally have their bodies joined again to their souls.

+     +     +

Death divides.  Life unites.

There are many ways in which death divides.  One way is that death divides the soul from the body.  But an even deeper division is the death caused by sin during life on earth.  Everyone experiences division within oneself, and on many different levels, some more important than others.  To give a less important, though difficult, example:  regarding something as simple as a diet, human persons are torn in two.  We “know” that we need to eat a more healthful diet, but we “want” to eat what’s satisfying.  That’s why the diet industry earns billions of dollars every year:  because human beings are divided inside, and their diets don’t address that fault line within the human person.

The same is true when we face decisions about spending time:  for example, whether to sleep in on a Saturday morning, or to tackle a needed chore.  Inside us, a tug-of-war goes on, and more often then not, the lower side—the baser side—wins.

St. Paul in his New Testament letters often writes about division within his own life.  But he doesn’t write about diets or chores.  He speaks about division in the very heart of man’s soul, and about sin as the cause of this division.  In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul tackles this conflict head on.  He writes:

“I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  ….  So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  …. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  ….   Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”  [Romans 7:15,17, 18-19, 24-25].

There is only one way strong enough to overcome division.  That way is Jesus Christ.  This truth was proclaimed in the Alleluia Verse before today’s Gospel Reading:  “Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death / and brought life to light through the Gospel” [see 2 Timothy 1:10].

Jesus has brought “life to light”.  What is this life?  This is the life of grace.

The life of grace—which is life in Christ—strengthens us not to give in to division in any form.  Finally, the life of grace strengthens us against the deepest temptation to division:  that is, the temptation to divide death from life.

This is really two opposite temptations.  You can divide death from life in two different ways.  Both ways lead away from Christ, or rather, away from the Way of Christ.

First, you can focus on death to the exclusion of life.  When you do this, you become not just weak and pessimistic, but self-centered, because your self-pity prevents you from seeing outside your misery.  You will neither allow others to give you a hand, or God to give you His grace.

Second, you can focus on life to the exclusion of death.  When you do this, you become what’s called a “Pollyanna”, believing in a false form of life, a phony optimism.  This false hope ignores the power and presence of sin and death, and so eventually has no need for either repentance or grace.

In Rome I wrote my thesis on the greatest work of the convert and apologist G. K. Chesterton, titled The Everlasting Man.  In the last chapter of that work, Chesterton wrote:  “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”  What Chesterton states about Christianity is true of each authentic disciple of Jesus Christ.  Each Christian falls because of his own sins and because of the sins of those around him.  But each Christian can rise through the grace offered by Christ’s sacraments.  The Christian life takes seriously both sin and grace, death and life, yet never doubts that in that stupendous battle between death and life, life in Christ will always be victorious.

references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 548-549, 646, 994: Jesus raises the dead
CCC 1009-1014: death transformed by Christ
CCC 1042-1050: hope for a new heaven and a new earth

Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter by William Blake (1757–1827)