“God Created Everything Except…”
by Brian Flanagan, Fiat Ventures
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
God. You’ve heard of him, right? Long white beard, sitting on a throne, Creator of the Universe and all that. The guy who made the heavens and the earth, the platypus and the tarantula, the coffee bean. We usually talk about God as the Creator of everything there is.
So it’s surprising then, that this Sunday’s first reading starts off with the words “God did not make…”. Even things you and I create are only possible because of God’s creation, like these typed words. So what is it that God did not make? What is it in the universe that exists and wasn’t part of God’s creative genius?
“God did not make death”. That actually sounds kind of strange to hear, because death is a natural part of what we experience in our lives. Many of us have lost family members, or on a smaller scale have lost pets…or at least have passed a poor deer on the side of the road who just didn’t see the ironic Deer Park truck coming. But God did not make death.
So…then who did? The Devil? Well, sort of. Forget your image of the devil with pointy red ears, a tail, and a pitch-fork. The devil was a great angel of light who decided he wanted to be like God. But after St. Michael the Archangel put him in his place and said, “Get a load of this guy…he thinks he can be like God! Who is like God?”, the Devil packed his bags, cranked up Billy Joel’s 1977 hit “Movin’ Out”, and drove away yelling “I will not serve!” He chose eternal separation from God – and from air conditioning.
Now the Devil had to get even – so he set his sights on messing things up for God’s favorite and most beloved creation – humanity. After watching Snow White on Netflix and seeing her eat the poisoned apple, he got an idea. With infomercial-like skill, he got Adam and Eve to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit, and here enters that thing that God did not create – death.
God did not make death – actually we did. The Devil couldn’t cause our downfall alone, he needed our help. He needed to twist our hearts to desire something other than God and twist our minds to think we knew better than God. And unfortunately the apple wasn’t a one-time thing. We’ve inherited that sinful nature, and sin leads to death.
This of course doesn’t mean that everyone who sins will be smitten by a lightning bolt and die on the spot. It also doesn’t simply refer to the “death” of being in hell, eternally separated from God, which we are saved from in Christ. But this “death” that is caused by sin affects us even in this life. Someone striving for virtue and holiness will have a much more fulfilling, satisfying life on this side of eternity too. Big-time sinners are often completely miserable, even though they’re doing everything the world says will make them happy.
The last line of the first reading, talking about death, says “those who belong to his company experience it.” What does it mean to belong to the devil’s company? Maybe another way to phrase that would be hanging out with his crowd. Just like in this life if we hang around the wrong people, we’ll be affected by them. If we follow the Devil’s lead, telling God “I will not serve”, we’ll experience emptiness and “death”.
But this week’s Psalm speaks of the Lord rescuing us from that “death”, bringing us fulfilling, abundant life. God did not create death, and he doesn’t want us to experience it one bit; whether literally or figuratively. Jesus himself is the solution – in him we find resurrection and abundant life. So instead of being on the highway to hell, we can be on the stairway to heaven.
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