God did not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living. It is a biblical conviction that God made everything good and whole; God made everything beautiful and good. However, the reality is that death marks our life and puts an end to it. In addition, disease burdens us from birth and is the foretaste of death throughout our lives. If God had made us only to live a few years, each person according to the time allotted to him, we would have to believe that God repented of that mistake and therefore would have sent his Son to die and rise from the dead to save us from sin and death. But God did not make death . If Christ has conquered his own death with his resurrection and offers us to conquer ours, if we join him, that means that Christ has come from God to fix a flaw that befell us after creation. If God did not make us mortal, it makes sense that his love led him to correct our mortality. God created everything to subsist. The creatures of the world are healthy; there is no deadly poison in them. But the truth is that there is, but God did not want it that way. What happened then?
God created man never to die, for he made him in the image and likeness of himself; but through the devil’s envy death entered the world and is experienced by those who belong to him. This passage from the book of Wisdom takes up the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, according to which our death is the consequence of having succumbed to Satan’s seduction of wanting to live apart from God, independent of God, forgetful of God. The Bible understands death not as a biological process of wear and tear and dysfunction. He understands death as the result of the pretension of living without God, far from God, at the margin of God. Death by biological wear and tear or by accident that destroys the organism is not the fundamental problem and is even natural. The fundamental problem of humanity is life without meaning, doomed to frustration, because it has no goal to reach, no fulfillment to aspire to, no fullness to yearn for. When the horizon of eternity is lost, temporal life also lacks meaning and purpose. This is also why assisted suicide has been legalized in several countries.
Humans suffer from many needs; some suffer from temporary and bodily deprivation in a serious way: hunger, sickness, homelessness. We need housing, education, income. We compound our natural evils with moral evils: corruption, violence, theft, sexual degradation, deceit and lies, fraud and abuse. But all these temporary evils somehow have at least some relief through human action. God urges us to act responsibly to remedy them. But the greater need, because it cannot be remedied in any way by us with our knowledge and skills, is to give meaning to this temporary life so that death is not seen as the exit from an existence that has lost meaning and neither is it seen as a threat that undermines the meaning of life so that it is worth living despite having to die. Why live, if we are going to die? Nor is this life the only thing there is, so that when it is uncomfortable it is better to end it by euthanasia; nor is death the final reality, so that life is meaningless because it ends in annihilation.
On the other hand, this mentality that the only thing that exists is this life, obliges the Church itself to accredit itself in the eyes of society, not by preaching and announcing life after death, but by actions that a society enclosed in immanence is capable of valuing. For this reason, it sometimes seems that the Church is an institution whose main concern and mission is to seek solutions to the problem of climate change, to alleviate the real suffering of migrants, to try to mitigate the health, food, education and housing needs of the most destitute population. These are real problems, whose solution is in the hands of those who have to manage the common good in society and not so much in the hands of bishops and priests. But whoever thinks that the Church (especially the clergy) is only worth as much as it contributes to the solution of temporal needs is in fact saying that Christ’s mission is useless, outdated and unnecessary.
Because Christ came primarily to give an answer to the problem of death that every individual suffers. Certainly he taught us that we must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the migrant and visit the sick. He told us that these works made us fit to enter the kingdom of God. But his main mission was to show us that we are called to eternity and that it is not right to resign ourselves to this temporal life as the only reality that counts, but that we must live this temporal life with moral responsibility and charity in function of the eternal one we await.
Today’s Gospel story links two narratives in which Jesus is shown as the one who has come to restore health and life. They require his intervention to cure a sick girl, but when they arrive at the house where she is, the girl has died and everyone thinks that Jesus has nothing more to do. This is what many people think today; Jesus is good to motivate the solution of temporal problems, but not to open horizons of eternity. Jesus can no longer do anything in the face of death. But he insists, and makes the child awaken to this mortal and temporal life, as a sign that he has come to awaken us from the sleep of death to life where there is no more sickness, no more pain, no more tears, for it is life with God forever. On the way, a woman robs Jesus, so to speak, of his healing power, for she approaches him unnoticed and touches his cloak in the conviction that she will recover her health. Jesus realizes, turns around, asks the one who touched him to show himself. The grieving woman comes forward and Jesus reassures her with these words: Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be cured of your illness. We know that these words of Jesus are a foretaste of a more radical, more definitive, more profound healing. Jesus has come to cure us of the definitive illness that is death, which is not part of God’s creative design. Let us not invalidate the mission of Jesus, which cost him such a high price to accomplish. Let us not reduce Jesus to a moral teacher to face the temporal shortcomings of humanity and accept death as a hopeless fatality.