15 June 2015
Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Even since man parted ways with God in the garden of Eden, he has grappled with the (false) notion that to “live” means to “be like gods, knowing good and evil.” In search of life, man has sought to impose his will, to do “what he wants.” It is the serpent who perpetuates the lie that to be like God is to “know” evil as well as good. When we “know” evil, we know it from within, in a concupiscent way. But God does not “know” evil in this way, since to do so would be to reject his very being as love. God knows only the good, and within that knowledge of the good, he sees evil for what it truly is: a profound rejection of the life of love that God offers us without reserve.
When we reason according to the serpent’s logic, it can seem to us that the serpent told the truth when he said that Adam and Eve would not die when they ate the forbidden fruit. But this would make a liar of God, whereas we know that, in reality, it is the serpent who is always a liar. Saint Paul says that death enters into the world with sin, and Ignatius of Loyola helps to unmask the serpent’s lie by observing that the very first level of humility, the one that is necessary for salvation and required of all Christians, is to prefer to die (physically) rather than to commit a mortal sin that would separate us from our true (spiritual) life in God (SpEx 165). This most basic level of humility stands before us as a challenge because we are used to thinking that true life is found in an unconstrained physical life, rather than the genuine boundlessness of love that is only possible in the life that God offers us.
The fullness of life is revealed in the life of Jesus Christ, who offers us His life, which is nothing less than the divine life of God. Jesus lives this divine life of God in his human life, which is very different from the unconstrained life that the serpent indicates. Indeed, instead of insisting on his own way, Jesus reveals the fullness of life by turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, giving over his cloak with his tunic… in this way, he “has nothing, and yet possesses all things.” While this life makes no sense apart from Christ, in Christ, it is life eternal, the life that even death cannot take away (cf. John 11:25-26). God offers us the grace to live this life, his life, and “we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.”