(Thirteenth Sunday
of the Year (B): This homily was given on June 28, 2015 at St. Pius X Church,
Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.
Read Wisdom 1: 13-15; 2: 23-24; Psalm 30; Mark 5: 21-43.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Thirteenth Sunday 2015]
What we believe about death directly affects what we believe
about life.
Perhaps you’ve never
made that association before, but it’s true nonetheless.
This means that if
we have the right perspective on death—a perspective that’s rooted in the
truths of Sacred Scripture and our Catholic faith—we will also have a healthy
perspective on life. We will understand
the purpose of life, the meaning of life, the value of life—and the sacredness
of life.
And we will probably
act accordingly—at least most of the time.
On the other hand,
if we have the wrong perspective on death, we will, in all likelihood,
understand none of those things. And
that will have a negative impact on how we act:
on how we treat our neighbor, and on how we treat ourselves.
To illustrate this
let me share with you now three common errors—three common false beliefs—about
death, and how those beliefs affect people’s actions.
False belief #1
concerning death: God is to blame for it. He’s the cause of it. He’s the source of death; it comes directly
from him.
Now if you believe
that (and many people today do!), I ask you: How likely will you be to love God
and serve God and obey God in your life?
Not very!
You’ll want nothing
to do with him! You’ll look at God as
your enemy—as the source of evil—as the ultimate killjoy who gets his jollies
out of taking from you the people you love.
This is the false
belief about death that was directly addressed in our first reading today,
which was taken from the Old Testament Book of Wisdom. Listen again to these words:
God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being … For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world …
Our God is the Lord
and Giver of life; he’s not the “dealer of death”! Death came into the world when sin came into
the world through our first parents. So
it was ultimately the work of the devil.
And it’s the eternal
effects of that sin of Adam and Eve which Jesus came into the world to
eliminate by his passion, death and resurrection.
Believing that God
loves us so much that he sent his only begotten Son to do this for us—to save
us from eternal death—will cause a person to see God as he really is: a Friend
and a Savior, not an enemy.
Which brings us to
false belief #2 concerning death: We
should have absolute control over it as human beings. People who believe that support things like
physician-assisted suicide and the so-called “right-to-die”—which, by the way,
sooner or later becomes the duty-to-die! This came home to me in a powerful way when I
read an online article recently by Michael Brendan Dougherty concerning the current
situation in Belgium, where physician-assisted suicide has been legal for quite
some time. In that article, Dougherty
wrote the following:
And chillingly, doctors pressure patients into making the decision. One doctor, who performs euthanasia eight to 10 times a year, told [writer Rachel] Aviv, “Depending on communication techniques, I might lead a patient one way or the other.”
How could it be otherwise? The idea that suicide, alone among medical treatments, would solely be the patient's decision, absent any social or financial pressure from a doctor, was always a fiction. Doctors are in the business of advising and steering patients toward recommended treatments. That’s precisely why suicide should not be a treatment, and certainly not one offered to people who aren't ill. (“How Belgium went down the slippery slope of assisted suicide,” The Week, June 18, 2015.)
Today’s gospel story
of the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead reminds us that God—and only
God—is the Lord of life (as we say in the Nicene Creed each week at Mass). And so only he should determine the exact moment when we leave this earthly
existence.
I should also
mention here that this false belief that people should have absolute control
over death sometimes extends beyond the self, to others.
That’s why some
doctors perform abortions, and why ISIS terrorists and South Carolina racists kill
innocent people who’ve done nothing wrong.
They want absolute control over the deaths of other human beings.
What a person believes about death directly affects what
that person believes about life—their own life AND the lives of others.
The third and final
false belief about death that I’ll mention today is this one: It’s the end; it’s the final chapter of a
human life.
With atheism
becoming more and more prevalent in our world (at least according to the news
polls), this error is obviously becoming more and more widespread; which is
scary because, as the Russian author Dostoevsky once said, “If God does not
exist, EVERYTHING is permissible.”
Including things
that you and I—and a lot of other civilized people—would find repugnant and
reprehensible. Think about it, my
brothers and sisters: if there is no Judgment, and no final moral Authority in
this earthly life, then right and wrong become matters of opinion and opinion only.
Your ideas about
right and wrong are just that: they’re your
ideas. Others have their ideas about
those very same issues, and you have no valid reason for saying that their
ideas are wrong. You can make your own
rules, and live by your own rules; because death is the end, and there’s no one
to whom you will have to answer afterward for your actions.
Doesn’t this make
you glad you’re a Catholic Christian?
It should!
It makes me glad—and
thankful—because Catholic Christianity is the antidote to all of these false
beliefs about death! Every single one of
them. Our faith tells us, first of all,
that physical death is not the end. Quite
to the contrary, Catholic Christianity tells us that the physical death of the
body is actually a new beginning—and potentially a glorious one! It tells us that this life matters; that
we’re here for a reason; that there’s something at stake in this mortal
existence. It tells us that we’re really
here on this earth to make a decision: THE
DECISION—the ultimate decision about where we want to live for all eternity.
And it tells us how
to make the correct ultimate decision
so that we will eventually arrive at the place we were made for. It tells us that we make this decision by
following the Lord—the Lord of life—until
he chooses, in his time, to call us home.