Did God Make Death?

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Hey everyone,

 

Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.

 

I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.

 

In this episode, we’re going to focus on three details for this upcoming Sunday Mass Readings. Two of the details come from the first reading, taken from Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24, and both have to do with theological questions concerning death—God’s causal relation to it, and its relation to the fall of Adam. The third detail is Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter in the Gospel reading, taken from Mark 5:21-24, 35b-43, which is the shorter version that leaves out the story of the hemorrhaging woman.

 

Let’s start with the first reading from Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24. Here’s what we read:

 

God did not make death,

nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.

For he fashioned all things that they might have being;

and the creatures of the world are wholesome,

and there is not a destructive drug among them

nor any domain of the netherworld on earth,

for justice is undying.

For God formed man to be imperishable;

the image of his own nature he made him.

But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world,

and they who belong to his company experience it.

 

The first detail I want to focus on is the statement, “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”

 

There are two questions that this verse gives rise to. The first is this: if God didn’t make death, then how do we explain God’s making of material creatures that are subject to corruption and death? There seems to be an incompatibility between these two beliefs.

 

In response, the problem only arises if we assume death is some thing that God makes. But death is not some substance that has being. Rather, death is a privation of what ought to be there in the nature of the thing—namely, the union of its body and soul.

 

Death, therefore, doesn’t fall within the purview of divine causality, which is gives being, since there’s no being to be given in death. When a thing physically exists, God is giving being to the physical substance, which involves the union of its body and soul. But when death occurs, the metaphysical reality is that God, for whatever reason in his providence, ceases to give being to the physical union, resulting in the disunity of the body and the soul, i.e., death.

 

So, it’s true to say, “God did not make death,” even though the material beings that he does make are subject to death insofar as they are material creatures.

 

The second question that arises is this: How can we say that God does not rejoice in the destruction of the living when throughout the Bible God positively wills the death of human beings?”

 

The answer to this question depends on whether death is willed by punishment or not.

 

In situations where death is willed as punishment, death of itself is not that which terminates or completes God’s willing. In other words, he’s not delighting in the death itself. Nor does God delight in the punishment itself, since punishment in these cases is the death of the sinner.

 

Rather, God delights in the justice that such lethal punishments take on. And that justice simply is a manifestation of God’s divine wisdom, which just is his own goodness.

 

So, God’s willing of lethal punishment in proportion to the gravity of certain sins is just a willing of his own goodness. He rejoices in his own goodness, not the death!

 

Now, in situations where there is an innocent person involved, and the death doesn’t take on the form of punishment, we have a bit of a more difficult situation, although not insolvable.

 

Consider, first of all, that God doesn’t owe the preservation of physical life to any material creature. The corruption and death of physical beings, as mentioned before, is part and parcel of physical beings. This being the case, God’s preservation of the life of physical beings is something over and above their nature. Since God does not owe what is over and above our nature, it follows that he doesn’t owe us the preservation of our physical life. His willing the death of a physical being is simply consistent with that thing’s nature.

 

So, at least so far, we can see that God willing the death of an innocent human being is not contrary to his justice. But how is this not a rejoicing in death?

 

Well, like in our explanation for punishment, in these situations where God wills the death of an innocent person, that event willed wouldn’t terminate or complete God’s willing because such an event would necessarily be ordered some-how to the good of the whole providential plan, which just is a manifestation of the divine goodness. This the being the case, God’s willing the death of an innocent human person ultimately would be simply a willing of his own goodness.

 

Now, it’s true that we might know what that specific good relative to the whole providential plan is. And that’s okay. We should expect to not know somethings that pertain to God’s providential plan.

 

But we can know that there is a good that God orders it to. And that’s all we need apologetically speaking.

 

The second detail worth highlighting in this first reading is 2:24: “But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it.”

 

The question that arises here is, “How do we reconcile this statement with what science tells us concerning the millions of years of the death of animals before Adam and Eve ever existed?”

 

The key is that “death” here refers to human death. The context bears this out. The immediately preceding verse, verse 23, reads, “For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him.” The author then contrasts this truth with death entering the world through the envy of the devil. The implication is that the devil’s envy caused death for man.

 

Also, notice how the author states afterward, “they who belong to [the devil’s] company experience [death].” By “they” the author is referring to the humans.

 

This interpretation maps on with what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches in paragraph 400. It states,

 

The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay.”284 Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground,” for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.” (emphasis in original).

 

The Catechism elsewhere states in paragraph 376: “As long as Adam remained in divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die.” This fits with Wisdom’s teaching, “For God formed man to be imperishable.”

 

So, Wisdom’s teaching about death entering into the world doesn’t conflict with what science tells us about the death of animals before the fall.

 

Okay, let’s now move to Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter in the Gospel reading. This account is taken, again, from Mark 5:21-24, 35b-43. Here’s the report:

 

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat
to the other side,
a large crowd gathered around him, and he stayed close to the sea.
One of the synagogue officials, named Jairus, came forward.
Seeing him he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, saying,
“My daughter is at the point of death.
Please, come lay your hands on her
that she may get well and live.”
He went off with him,
and a large crowd followed him and pressed upon him.

While he was still speaking, people from the synagogue official’s house arrived and said,
“Your daughter has died; why trouble the teacher any longer?”
Disregarding the message that was reported,
Jesus said to the synagogue official,
“Do not be afraid; just have faith.”
He did not allow anyone to accompany him inside
except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James.
When they arrived at the house of the synagogue official,
he caught sight of a commotion,
people weeping and wailing loudly.
So he went in and said to them,
“Why this commotion and weeping?
The child is not dead but asleep.”
And they ridiculed him.
Then he put them all out.
He took along the child’s father and mother
and those who were with him
and entered the room where the child was.
He took the child by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum,”
which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”
The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around.
At that they were utterly astounded.
He gave strict orders that no one should know this
and said that she should be given something to eat.

 

What I want to focus on here are the elements that support the historical reliability of the story. And I’m going to look to John P. Meier for some help. In volume two of his work A Marginal Jew, he gives five reasons to think this narrative is historical.

 

First, the high status of Jairus as a synagogue official within the region of Galilee makes the event checkable. It’s not like this miracle is being performed for some Joe in a back alley that no one ever heard of.

Identifying Jairus as a synagogue official serves another reason for this narrative’s historicity. It’s unlikely that Christians would have added this name to the oral tradition prior to the Marcan narrative, because Christians were not sympathetic to the synagogue leaders. The synagogues and their leaders banned the early Christians from their communities, putting them on Rome’s radar for persecution. It’s apologetically unappealing to add an individual from a group that was hostile to the early Christians.

This is perhaps why Matthew doesn’t even mention Jairus’s name and reduces him to a mere “ruler” (Matt. 9:18). Since including the name of a synagogue ruler would run contrary to any apologetic purposes that Mark might have had (and Luke—see Luke 8:41), yet he still includes him, it’s reasonable to conclude that it’s true.

A third reason for this event’s historicity is that it meets the criterion of embarrassment. Notice that when Jesus told the mourners that the little girl was sleeping, “they laughed at him” and Jesus “put them all outside” (v.40). People laughing at and scorning Jesus would have left a bitter taste in the mouth of the early Christians. If the early Christians weren’t concerned with truth, they wouldn’t have added this to the oral tradition. Furthermore, it’s a bit of an embarrassment to portray Jesus as giving the boot to grieving people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that this event was a part of the primitive tradition that Mark is drawing on, and that it dates back to the time of Jesus’ ministry.

The story also contains unique Semitisms, which for scholars give good reason to think that the narrative has its origin within a Palestinian community near the time of Jesus. And the closer a narrative is to the events it narrates, the more reliable it is.

Meier gives several. But one in particular is Jesus’ statement, “talitha koum,” which is Aramaic for, “Little girl, I say to you, rise” (Mark 5:41). That Mark preserves the phrase in its Aramaic form, and doesn’t translate it into Greek, suggests an authentic primitive tradition.

Not only is this phrase significant because it’s in Aramaic, but, as Fr. Robert Spitzer points out in his book God So Loved the World, it’s in popular Aramaic as opposed to formal or written Aramaic (which would have been talitha koumi). This would be akin to my saying, “y’all” versus “you all,” or “that ain’t gonnahappen” versus “that will not happen.”

Why would Mark preserve talitha koum if it’s an incorrect way of speaking? Perhaps because he was trying to preserve the expression as it came from the lips of Jesus himself.

I could imagine that if I were giving a talk that was being transcribed, the transcriber wouldn’t change my Southern expressions to proper English, because such expressions identify me as a Southerner. Similarly, it’s likely that Mark doesn’t correct Jesus’ improper mode of speech because he’s trying to preserve the expression as it came from Jesus. The late Jewish scholar Géza Vermes reaches a similar conclusion in his book The Changing Faces of Jesus:

It may also be presumed that like Peter, whose northern identity betrayed his speech [Matthew 26:73; Mark 14:70; Luke 22:59], Jesus also spoke the Galilean dialect of Aramaic. His command addressed to the “dead” daughter of Jairus is reproduced as Talitha kum (“Little girl,” or literally, “Little lamb, get up”) in the oldest codices of Mark 5:41. But kum represents Galilean slovenly speech in joining the masculine form of the imperative to a feminine subject, as against the grammatically correct kumi which we find in some of the more recent and polished manuscripts of the Gospel.

Finally, it’s worth noting the absence of Christological titles in the narrative. This would have been a perfect opportunity to highlight Jesus’ divinity with a post-resurrection title like Lord, given that he’s manifesting his power over life and death. But Mark, Matthew, and Luke all refer Jesus only as “teacher” in their account of raising Jairus’s daughter. Luke does up the ante a bit with Master (Greek, epistatēs) in his account of Jesus healing the hemorrhaging woman (Luke 8:46). But even that falls short of the divine title Lord.

So, that Jesus raised the dead is something we can trust, because the record of such a deed is historically reliable. And as long as a skeptic is not ahistorical, and allows historical testimony as valid evidence for a miracle having occurred, then Jesus’ raisings of the dead provide him with a type of miracle that can rationally justify belief not just in the existence of God, but in Jesus’ divinity.

 

Conclusion

 

Well, my friends, that does it for this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The first reading and the Gospel reading for this upcoming 13^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, don’t sell us short when it comes to material for apologetical discussions:

 

• God’s causal relation to death and his goodness,
• The reconciliation of the scientific narrative of history and the biblical narrative, and
• The historicity of Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter, which provides rational grounds for belief in the divinity of Jesus.

 

That’s definitely a treasure chest for apologetical study.

 

As always, thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.

 

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I hope you have a blessed 13^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B. Until next time, God Bless!