Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
There is nothing so jarring to human existence as death. Whether it’s the suddenness or the finality of it, death simply seems wrong. It feels so wrong when it’s a young person, when a parent has to bury a child. But even with a person who lived a long life, and who went through a prolonged illness, death still hurts and seems like it doesn’t belong. And it doesn’t.
Our first reading reminds us that “God did not make death.” That hearkens back to Genesis, where God, the source of life, breathes His life into Adam and Eve. But then, after they rebel against God and are banished from the Garden, God puts a limit on mortal life. In one sense, this was a mercy, as God did not want us to live forever in a fallen state, always subject to the reign of sin.
But then in our Gospel, we hear a kind of undoing of death in two ways: in an older woman, and in a younger child. You may have missed the part about the older woman, but she had been suffering "with hemorrhages for twelve years.” I’m no doctor, but a hemorrhage is a flow of blood. Blood, to the Jews, was life, so if she was “leaking” blood, she was, in a sense, dying; the life was flowing out of her. So both were, at least in one sense, dying. And Jesus brings them both back to life.
The Resurrection of Jesus is part of the good news that is at the heart of being Catholic. And it’s good news because death is not, despite our experience, final. It is the answer to a question that sits on every human heart. Every human experiences death, and senses the wrongness of it. As we sit in the funeral home with the casket in front of us, greeting family and friends, crying at the loss, laughing at favorite memories, we know it’s not supposed to be that way. Jesus helps us to know that it no longer is that way, because He rose from the dead.
Jesus’ Resurrection wasn’t like the new life that He gave to the woman with hemorrhages, or the daughter of Jairus, or the son of the widow of Nain, or even Lazarus. They still died again. But Jesus will not die again; His death was once for all. Death was the poverty that Jesus took upon Himself, because Jesus is Life. It’s like light becoming darkness, or gold becoming clay. But Jesus did so because He knew that darkness cannot conquer light, and He wanted to make us who were clay into gold. St. Augustine talks about this as the admirabile commercium, the wonderful exchange. We gave Jesus death, which He willingly took upon Himself, and He gave us life.
So how do we get this deal? How do we participate in this exchange? Baptism begins this, as we die with Jesus in the waters of baptism, and rise to a new life of grace. But it’s more than baptism. Baptism is only the beginning. What is meant to follow is a day-by-day deepening in our friendship with Jesus, and giving Him our death, and receiving His life.
The woman with the hemorrhages and Jairus, the father of the young girl, are beautiful examples of this exchange. They have faith in Jesus, and so they go to Him. Jairus goes to find Jesus, and the woman approaches Jesus as He walks in the crowd. How often do we truly seek after Jesus, rather than fatalistically figuring that what is going to happen will happen? How often do we take our death to Jesus to receive life? It’s as simple as asking.
But we also have to be willing to receive. The life that Jesus wants for us is not the life we gave to Him. We give Jesus a fallen life, a life of sin and death, and He wants to give us life. But in order to receive life, we have to give up sin and death. We have to do our best to put behind us those things that we want to do because of the fall, because of our concupiscence, our desire to do evil and avoid good, rather than doing good and avoiding evil. Too often, we want to give Jesus our death, but we’d like to hang on to it a little, because, while deadly, it’s also familiar, and sometimes even a bit of fun. But if we hang on to death, we cannot have life. It’s not so much a punishment, as simply the way things work in the spiritual realm. If our hands are still clenching onto what we have, they are not open to receive what Jesus wants to give.
