A Reflection for the Thirtieth Sunday in Extraordinary Time
Readings: Sirach 35:12-14, 16-18 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 Luke 18:9-14
A day or two before he died of lung cancer, my father said to me, “Son, I’m not long for this world.” He was at home in hospice care, and I used to be reading Scripture to him.
That was an exceptional moment. In my experience, even those that are quite near their very own deaths avoid direct acknowledgment of it of their conversations. They do speak of plans for what’s to occur after their deaths, but anyone of a certain age does so, typically long before the event.
Yet when death is actually imminent, people often stop speaking of it. My mother only averred to it on her deathbed when she said to me: “Terry, no more pain medications. I need to be alert.”
It will not be that those that are dying deny the actual fact. No, they typically go to some effort to inform their cherished ones that they’re loved. They speak of their faith in God and of their desire for forgiveness. They simply avoid speaking directly of the nice darkness that’s death itself.
Our Lord, nonetheless, often spoke of his coming death, and he was not being morbid. Neither was St. Paul when he wrote:
Beloved:
I’m already being poured out like a libation,
and the time of my departure is at hand.
I actually have competed well; I actually have finished the race;
I actually have kept the religion (2 Tim 4:6-7).
Religious genius that he was, Paul was capturing the meaning of death for a Christian. Yes, it’s something that comes at the top of life, like a finish line. But death must also imprint itself into our each day lives. There may be a dying in living. We should always die to our own wills, surrendering a bit more of life every day that we live. With every day, we will learn anew easy methods to live in a way that involves pouring ourselves out “like a libation,” offering ourselves to God through our love and repair of others.
In shedding his blood, Christ surrendered his human life to his Father and to us.
None of this happens naturally. We don’t grow in virtue just by growing old. It’s a present of grace for which we must pray. The years make some souls quite supple. Others, they only gnarl the more.
To be a Christian is ever to grow in our imitation of Christ. He got here amongst us to pour himself out. Put simply, that’s who Jesus is. He’s the one who empties himself.
St. Paul would write of him that “he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:7-8). On Calvary, Jesus revealed most fully and eventually who he was as a person, the one who’s poured out like a libation. In shedding his blood, Christ surrendered his human life to his Father and to us.
The Italian mystic Chiara Lubich (1920-2008) wrote that in death Jesus poured out his divine life as well. He gave it back to the Father by pouring it out upon us. Christ became a very unfolded, open flower, offering its final fragrance to us, the very life he had himself enjoyed in his divinity.
Jesus also gives…his own spiritual death, his own divine death, by giving God. He even empties himself of God; he gives God. And he does that within the moment of his abandonment.
Only in his death, at a particular moment in human history, does Christ come to be something he was not before Calvary. In his abandonment, he’s now a latest Father, one who births a latest creation. Thus, there’s
a latest gasp of joy in God-love, who’s all the time latest. A cry of infinite suffering in Christ’s humanity: “My God, my God, why have you ever abandoned me.”
God is a trinity of selfless, ceaseless outpouring love. The Father pours all that he’s into the Son; the Son returns to the Father all that he has received, all that he’s; and the Holy Spirit never emerges from this ceaseless act of affection to assert his own, proper identity. He simply is the ever-flowing love of God.
Allow us to admit what we prefer to forget. We now have been given life, and we’ll give up it. The query is whether or not it’s going to be pried from our dying, dark grasp or whether we’ll ourselves pour it out. Will we suffer our dreams and designs, our wishes and our wills, to flow away from us with something of the identical abandonment-of-self that’s God?