God Did Not Create Death – 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; June 30 2024

God did not make death.

That is a rather remarkable statement, given that God created the entire physical world, the whole world of living things, which necessarily involves the death not just of plants, but of animals as well. Further, the human body would be naturally subject to death.

What, then, could it possibly mean that God did not make death. First of all, it applies only to man, and it means that despite our nature, God would have preserved us from death, had not Adam sinned. The tree of life in the garden of Eden speaks of what would have been a remedy for human mortality, a remedy that was lost due to Adam’s sin.

That means that death for us is both natural and a punishment for sin; natural because that is the way we are made, but a punishment for sin, because we were destined to be raised above the level of our mere creation; the purpose for which God made us goes beyond (transcends) our created nature.

This is hard for us to comprehend, but it is very important for us to believe. It is important for us to realize that the way things are now is not the way things are meant to be, that they were radically different in the beginning and will be radically different in the end as well. All too often we get ourselves get caught in the mentality of this passing world, which calculates everything in view of how things work in the present order of things and in terms of goals to be achieved in this world. We end up living our lives within a narrow horizon, as dwellers in a deep mountain valley who live in complete ignorance of the vast world beyond the mountains.

There is, however, also another meaning of death. Justice is undying. Justice is undying, but Adam, by sinning died to justice.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that:

“The Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an authentic way, in the light of the New Testament and Tradition, teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were constituted in an original ‘state of holiness and justice’. This grace of original holiness was ‘to share in…divine life’. By the radiance of this grace all dimensions of man’s life were confirmed. As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die. The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and woman, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation, comprised the state called ‘original justice’.” (CCC 375-376)

Adam and Eve were created in a state of sanctifying grace, sharing in God’s life and nature, and – unlike our present share in the life of grace – this original grace transformed all the dimensions of human life and human relationships. The life of grace, of itself, is “undying,” but it was capable of being lost through our own fault, it was capable of being lost because Adam was capable of freely rejecting the gift of “divine intimacy”. It was capable of being lost and it was lost because Adam did rebel against God.

In the day you shall eat of it you shall surely die. (Gen 2:7) That death was twofold: there was the death of the soul through the loss of sanctifying grace, which took place immediately, and there was the death of the body, to which mankind has since been subject, as a punishment for sin, by which God puts a limit on wrongdoing. The greatest criminal in the world can no longer commit crimes once he is dead.

Of course, when we talk about original sin, we need to remember that Christ has provided a remedy. Through faith and baptism, he restores the life of grace to the soul and gives the promise of the resurrection of the body.

Still, we need to understand more fully that state of original justice and holiness.

God created us to surpass our nature because he made us in his image; that image, which belongs to our nature, already contains something that is capable of “going beyond” because it is the image of God.

God said, “Let there be light.” And light was made. (Gen 1:3)  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … through him all things were made. (Jn 1:1,3) We can recognize the intellectual nature of God because he reveals himself as choosing to create all things good, by the power of his almighty Word, which expressed his mind. We are created in his image because he has endowed us with the spiritual powers of intellect and will.

It is within our power to know that we are endowed with intellect and will; but that these powers make us to be in the image of God needed to be revealed to us through his word.

Further, the word of God tells us that in the beginning God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. (Gen 1:26) The image speaks of our rational nature, which opens upward towards God, while the “likeness” speaks of the gift of sanctifying grace, whereby our nature is not only open upwards to God, but is raised up above itself to share in God’s own life and nature, to be able to know and love in a divine fashion, to be able to share in God’s own life of knowledge and love, to be able to know and love God himself.

Through the envy of the devil, death entered into the world.

Why should the devil have envied Adam? He too had been created in God’s image, even more than man, possessing a purely spiritual nature, with a vastly more powerful mind. He too had been created in the state of grace, sharing for a moment in the intimacy of God’s knowledge and love. Nevertheless, he rejected all this and so he envied Adam, who still had it. He envied Adam and wanted to drag him down to his own level of misery, together with all his descendants.

But why would the devil, himself a creature of God, reject the great treasure of grace? That too was because he envied Adam.

It seems that at the beginning of creation, before Adam himself was created, the Son of God made man, born of a woman, was revealed to the angels, thereby revealing to them also the mystery of the holy Trinity. It seemed that the angels were commanded to worship the Son of God made man. (cf. He 1:6) Note well, that the redemptive purpose of the Incarnation was not made known to them. Herein was the test of the angels’ faith, as a condition for their confirmation in grace and entrance into the beatific vision they needed to obey God’s command and bow down before the Son of God made man, placing themselves beforehand at his service.

That was too much for the devil. It seems then that the devil envied Adam for the honor bestowed on his race, in which the Son of God was destined to become incarnate. He thus rejected God’s grace because of what he perceived as a slight upon his honor; namely, that he was required to humble himself before an earthly offspring of Adam. He was perhaps even more enraged at having to honor the Mother of the Son of God.

We find a sort of echo or reminder of this original trial of the angels in God’s judgment on the serpent after Adam’s sin: I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed; she will bruise your head, and you shall bruise her heel. (Gen 3:15) Truly, the devil hates the Immaculate Virgin Mary, but his rage against her is in vain; during her earthly life, he was able to bruise her heel, by crucifying her Son, but was otherwise unable to touch her. Now that she has been taken up into heaven she is altogether out of his reach. Yet, she still has the power to crush his head.

They who belong to his company shall experience death. Those who follow the path of the devil’s pride and envy lose the life of grace and experience the death of the soul, which, if they do not repent, will be confirmed by the death of body, such that they experience perpetually the devil’s punishment. They will hear the words of Jesus: Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. (Mt 25:41)

We see the devil’s envy quickly replicated in human history, when Cain murdered the righteous Abel. Even though Christ had not yet come, Abel had attained the grace of God through faith in the coming of Christ; thus he was able to offer a sacrifice pleasing to God, the firstlings of his flock, that represented beforehand the death of Christ, and thus he was able also in his innocent person, to foreshadow the death of Christ by the shedding of his own blood. (cf. Gen 4:4; He 11:4) Cain envied the grace of Abel and that is why he slew him. (cf. 1 Jn 3:12) As Cain slew Abel, throughout history those who have rejected the grace of God persecute those who believe in Christ and seek to live in the grace of God. (cf. Jn 15:18-19) Wickedness hates innocence and seeks to destroy it.

Well, all this has mostly been about the fall of Adam, and the heights from which he fell, due to the envy of the devil. That, however, gives us the context – the broad horizon – for St. Paul’s summary message of the Gospel we have heard in today’s 2^nd reading. That helps us understand the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.

The riches of Jesus Christ are true riches, the riches of his divine nature, the riches also of the life of grace that belong to his sacred humanity. (cf. Jn 1:14,16) His poverty is the poverty of our mortal human nature, subject to the punishment of death, that he took to himself to pay the debt on our behalf.

In fulness of time God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. (Gal 4:4-5)

Jesus Christ did not only bestow the riches of his grace on us poor earthbound creatures, rather by the utter poverty of his Cross, he has bestowed the riches of his grace on us, sinners, rescuing us from slavery to the devil, making us to be his children. So it is that we give thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light, who delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. (Col 1:12-14)

The child is not dead but asleep. These words have a meaning that goes far beyond the context of the miracle. Christ has delivered us from death itself, from which there is no waking, changing it into a sort of sleep, from which we will awake – as he did – in the resurrection.

Now, if we truly recognize the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, our gratitude will be without limit, we will understand true wealth and true poverty, we will be delivered from preoccupation with the passing material wealth of this world – wealth that does not deserve the name – and we will abound in a spirit of generosity in all things.

Yet, we might find ourselves like the woman in today’s Gospel. Our weakness is like her hemorrhage. It just keeps “flowing”, it brings us great humiliation, nothing we do seems to help. If that is the case, then, like her we must approach Jesus with faith, reaching out to touch the hem of his garments, that is the sacraments of his Church. In her case, so that Christ’s power might be revealed, confession came after. For us, we must first make use of the sacrament of confession and then fortified by confession feed upon his life-giving Body, clothed with the appearance of bread.