God Did Not Make Death

Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary TIme

The first reading which comes from the Book of Wisdom was written about 50 years before the coming of Jesus.  Its author, whose name is not known to us, was probably a member of the Jewish community at Alexandria, in Egypt. At times he speaks in the person of Solomon, placing his teachings on the lips of the wise king of Hebrew tradition in order to emphasize their value. His profound knowledge of the earlier Old Testament writings is reflected in almost every line of the book, and marks him, like Ben Sira, as an outstanding representative of religious devotion and learning among the sages of postexilic Judaism.

In the very first chapter of his book, he writes: “God did not make death.” This is a radical, revolutionary idea. No other religion in the world, no other philosophy in the world, came up with this idea – only Judaism and the Christianity that sprang from Judaism and worshiped the God of the Jews, the God Jesus called his Father. The pagan religions of Greece and Rome include the gods of death and destruction in their respective pantheons; the Greeks called him Hades while the Romans called him Pluto.

The true God is the God of life, not of death. The god who made us in our image is a God of death as well as life, but the God who made us in his image is the God of life, not death. God is the creator of all being not the destroyer of all being. God gives life; God does not destroy it. Death is not built into the universe God created. Yes, all living things die. Even nonliving things come to an end. However, human death is different than all other death. God created us to live forever; human death is a consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve, not a consequence of the creation of God. As the author of the Book of Wisdom says: “By the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it.”

When the human race fell into sin, our immortal bodies fell from immortality to mortality because our souls fell from God who is the only source of immortality. Once we declared independence from God by our sins God’s life no longer flowed endlessly through our souls into our bodies. Once we pulled the plug, as it were, God’s electricity no longer turned on our appliances.

Physical death is not natural to us and we shouldn’t accept it as natural. Death is not part of God’s design, and we cannot accept it. Deep in our hearts, we all know that we were meant for something other than natural death. We were meant for eternal life. We naturally, spontaneously, hate death. We regarded it as an enemy, and we fear it as we fear all our enemies. Human beings can be stupid, selfish, shallow sinners; however, we believe that Jesus has defeated death for us. We believe that when our bodies surrender to physical death, we must surrender to God, the God who alone can conquer death for us and who promises us immortal life with God forever in heaven.

Our beloved dead are not dead. They are more alive than we are because of who Jesus is. He is the one whom everything in the universe obeys, even death. When someone we love dies, we should not say that God took that person away from us. The devil invented death, and we bought the devil’s product. God saved us from it: from the spiritual death that is sin, and from the physical death that is the necessary consequence of sin, and from the eternal death that would otherwise have been its final consequence. In other words, Christ redeemed us from all three enemies – sin and death and hell. Consequently, we pray: “You have made us for yourself, and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

Death is on the minds of this community this morning as we mourn the loss of Sr. Innocence Mills, who passed away yesterday at 10:20 AM. One of the sisters was reading the Gospel of the day to her when she realized that Sr. Innocence had slipped away quietly. She had been fortified with the sacraments of the Church as she had been promised through her devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. God did not take her away from us. She realized her dream and now lives it out with her Savior in Heaven. God is the God of Eternal Life.