27 September 2020
Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
This week, the Church’s calendar and lectionary offers us celebrations and readings that will remind us of the role that angels (both faithful and fallen) play in the drama of salvation. As important as angels are, though, we must ask the Lord to help us avoid any temptation towards “angelism” that might cause us to devalue the concrete reality of our messy human situation, which is not a mistake, but God’s gift to us. It is through embracing our fleshy, created humanity that we share the divine life that God offers us through the human life of his Son.
Temptations towards “angelism” are always, at some level, the rejection of the logic of the incarnation. All three temptations that Satan (a fallen angel) offers Jesus in the desert are temptations to reject the “givenness” of the concrete world that Jesus finds himself in in favor of tricks and shortcuts that would manipulate reality or create some sort of alternate world. These temptations abound for us more than ever today through the mediated, filtered, techno-manipulated world through which we can try to bend reality to correspond to whims and fancies.
The logic of Jesus Christ is altogether different from “angelism.” In the created world, it is not an angelic life that reveals the fullness of God’s life, but a human life: the life of Jesus Christ. Hebrews 2 declares that we “see Jesus ‘crowned with glory and honor’ because he suffered death, he who ‘for a little while’ was made ‘lower than the angels,’ that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9). Of course, we are frustrated when things do not go our way, and we are especially frustrated when we experience the suffering proper to our human condition today. But before we rise up like a Samson, seeking to destroy all that surrounds us, let us not forget what the life of God actually looks like in a human life. Fallen angels (and those who think like them) grasp after equality with God, but not Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8). If you wish to share this truly divine life Christ offers you through the fullness of your human life, no force on the face of this earth will be capable of denying you the grace of sharing it.