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Life and Death of Body and Soul
Homily St. Joseph Parish, Detroit
Today we must meditate on the mystery of death, that of the body then that of the soul, and finally on Jesus who is the resurrection and the life. For by raising Lazarus from the dead, we have a foreshadowing and a promise of the victory Christ won over sin. Next week is Palm Sunday, so the days of grace and penance of Lent are drawing ever more to a close. Do not give up your penances, but exercise them all the more, as an athlete runs harder towards the end of the race. After Palm Sunday Holy Week follows, through which we participate in the suffering and death of Christ in his Passion. All of which ends with the resurrection, which brought light into the world of man’s hopelessness. Death is the separation of the body from the soul. It is permanent, but only until the universal resurrection at the end of time. Death was introduced as a consequence of sin, which we find not only explicitly stated in the scriptures,[1] but also asserted by the Fathers of the Church, including St. Irenaeus in his work Against the Heretics.[2] Aristotle calls death the greatest of all punishments.[3] When Lazarus died, Jesus at first did nothing to prevent it. When he went to the home of his sisters, whom he loved – and how much the world needs to learn from God, of how we are to love one another, and how women are to be loved! – since he loved them, and they believed in him, he did for them one of the greatest signs he ever worked. Martha ran out to meet him, and Mary waited to be called, and so two souls in different ways had a real encounter with Christ. Martha knew that Jesus was the Messiah, and believed in the resurrection. When Jesus wanted to see Lazarus, he asked, “Where did you put him?” (Jn 11:34). Notice, he referred to the dead body not as “Lazarus’ body,” but as simply, “him.” For even after death the body isn’t some thing we throw in the trash, but a vessel made sacred by the soul it carried; and hence we bury the dead, and we do so with great funeral rites and prayers. Yet we read in Romans today of another death, a more horrifying one, the death of the soul. St. Paul says, “The body is dead because of sin” (Rom 8:8-11), as we just read. This poses a riddle to us. How is it that my body is dead by sin, yet here I am alive hearing St. Paul say this. Can I be alive and dead at the same time? Yes, you can; but not in the same way. There is the life of the body by which the body is alive; then there is the life of the soul, which is the life of grace. Death, either of the body or of the soul, needs to be understood in terms of privation. It is the evil by which the nature of a thing is taken away. It is a good which should be there, but is not. We don’t say rocks are dead, for they should never have been alive. We say a cadaver of a man or the carcass of an animal is dead, because the nature which moved them and united all the parts has been removed. In a living body, the organs all work together for the good of the whole. The feet bring us to the table, the nose smells and the mouth consumes, the eye discriminates the quality of the food, the organs digest each in their own way. Each part contributes to the whole, which is united. In a living soul, all the faculties (such as the intellect, will, imagination, memory, senses, passions and emotions, etc.) serve uniformly governed by reason, which in turn is governed by God. In contrast, in a dead body, none of the organs work to unity, and the whole corrupts into countless separate pieces. In a dead soul, none of the faculties work together; each tries to pull us in different directions: the will over here, the passions over there, the intellect over here, the imagination elsewhere. By sin, our living bodies are filled with a dead soul, a soul full of division and corruption. St. Augustine calls this the “death of sin.”[4] Yet death is not the last word on human existence. This is why Jesus says, “This sickness is not for death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (Jn 11:4). For by the death of the body, man does not end, he lives on, and is judged by God, and lives forever in heaven or hell. Furthermore, Jesus was about to reveal the resurrection of all the dead at the end of time with a perfect sign. He rose Lazarus from the dead, and so the death of his body glorified God. Now, we may ask, if Jesus raised one man, would he then raise all men? Jesus did not come to raise Lazarus from the dead; and eventually Lazarus had to die again in the flesh. This resurrection was a sign of something greater, of the re-creation of Man by baptism, and of his victory over sin. And by baptism, one is raised from the death of original sin, and even actual sins – a death worse than the death of the flesh – and is given a promise of eternal life. Jesus links this resurrection to his own person saying, “I am the resurrection and the life.”[5] And so, yes, Jesus will raise many more men besides Lazarus, first those who are baptized, then by the repentance of the baptized who sadly fall back into sin, and finally by the resurrection at the end of time. St. Paul, in fact, states, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thess 4:16). If you wish to be raised, therefore, live in the spirit. Renounce the death of sin. Be baptized, and confess your sins. Receive the sacraments, live the virtues and be docile to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Ah, but so many say, “We cannot give up our sinful habits.” The death of our sins runs so deep, how can we let them go? This is like those who saw Lazarus die, and, completely convinced that death was the last word on man, thought that not even Jesus could do anything about it. Similarly, we think Jesus cannot save us from our sins, that sin is the last word on man. But Jesus puts an end to such thinking with the words, “Your brother will rise.” If death is a consequence of sin, and Jesus can rise Lazarus from the dead, than Jesus can also put an end to sin. You are right to say you cannot give up your sinful habits, not by yourself. Jesus, however, is God, and he can bring you to such heights of holiness like you never dreamed possible. Abandon yourselves to Jesus, and Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life, will make you live. Amen.
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