10 August 2021
Feast of Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr
One of my Jesuit brothers once said to me, “Think about this: God gives you a self, and the first thing God asks you to do with it is to give it away.” While my Jesuit brother was likely going for shock value, his point does get at the heart of Jesus’ message today in the Gospel reading. God creates us out of love, and from God, we receive our primary identity as a beloved daughter or son. The first thing we are meant to do in our self-possession is give it away to others in love. The comment operates both as a maxim and a description: the self you have is the one that is given away. It is a strange way to treat a possession. Typically, our first inclination is to protect what we have received. We do not like to lose something which is ours. Psychological studies show that we feel the pain of loss more than we do the joy of gains always.
Jesus’ example of the seed offers us an invitation to see the world from a different perspective. A seed grows from what appears to be its end; furthermore, it receives what it needs to grow for its fall into the soil, like water and nutrients from the earth. While the seed dies, it also begins to live. Jesus asks us to behold a paradox, a classic “both…and” situation. As useful as logic is, we start to move from logic’s strict categories to see the world for all its complexities. While giving ourselves away is baffling to us, is it so from God’s vantage point? Our best apprehension of God is a Mystery that gives itself away constantly. God gives away the divine self in creation, in the Spirit which dwells in our hearts, and in the Eucharist. We are invited to do likewise with Christ who rises again even after the most gruesome death on the cross.
The life of St. Lawrence exhibits this paradoxical way of viewing the world. Lawrence was an early deacon of the Roman Church. As a deacon, he was responsible for distributing the Church’s resources to the community and the indigent. During the Valerian persecution of the Church, Lawrence was ordered to forfeit the wealth of the Church to imperial authorities.
Lawrence responded by first giving what material resources he could to the poor. Next, when he was to present the “treasures” of the Church, he gathered together the marginalized of Roman society, the nobodies to elites, and claimed them to be the true treasure of the Church. He was summarily sentenced to death. Lawrence gave himself to the people in his care and was like the seed which was not afraid to fall. Once again, maybe from our vantage point, it is shocking or strange. From the perspective of a God who has done similarly for us, where are we invited to do the same?